Orthadox and Unorthadox Standards
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Scenario: You want to go down the shops. Which way do you go? Which is the friendliest side of the pavement? How far is it? How much is the loaf of bread? How unsociable is the shopkeeper? Some of these questions have measurable answers, some do not.
But surley if you can measure the distance to the chemists, you can measure the friendliness of concerete, can't you?
No.
Normal Standards
There are measurable standards for all the following :
- Distance- Meters, Light Years
- Tempreture - Centigrade, Kelvin,
- Currency - Pound Sterling, US Dollars, Turkish Lira,
- Time - Minutes, Days
- Sound - Decibels, Hz
- Coulour - (to a certain extent) Wavelength
Unorthadox Standards
However, there is no measurable standard of the following:
- Smell
- Niceness
- The weather
- The moss gathering ability of stones
- The list goes on ....
As you may or may not know, all measurable standards have some kind of scientific base. There is a peice of metal, kept at the right tempreture in an airtight container in france, that is exactly one meter long. Tempreture is measured from absolute zero.
Various schemes have been devised to measure these "unorthadox" standards. The most famous suggestion for measuring niceness is the blunt stick1. Various attempts at measuring smell have included : The eggy, Silent but violent, like flowers, and musty. None of these come close to a scale. You cannot have, for example, a flower smelling 3.24 mustys.
The disgusting thing is, while we are here racking out brains out, people that are paid to do this work are devising measures for inverse particles in the 10th dimension, that really doesnt exist.
If you have any more suggestions for measurement, please place them below
1 A Sharp Stick was originally used, but few things were found to be worse that a poke in the eye with it
