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How tall are you in Smoots?
Posted
at
12:01 am
by Katie Mayer, Herald staff
Even more troublesome than the metric system: People at MIT celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Smoot, a unit of measurement invented by a group of fraternity brothers. A Smoot is 5 feet, 7 inches, the height of the student for whom it is named. It's also the height of a typical college student's pile of dirty laundry.
A football field is about 64.5 Smoots long*, but it must have seemed much longer to the Huskies, who lost to Arizona, 48-14. If things continue this way, it probably won't take a genius at MIT to calculate the odds that Tyrone Willingham will be around next season.
A hint of activism is in the air at a balloon festival in Albuquerque, where Greenpeace is spreading its message about the hazards of global warming with an Earth-themed balloon. Greenpeace is apparently unconcerned by the irony that its message at the festival is literally full of hot air.
A traffic engineer in Europe who believes that removing stripes and signs prompts drivers to behave more cautiously liked to prove the point by walking backward through a rule-free intersection with his eyes closed. Drivers allegedly just went around him, a feat made more incredible by the fact that some were likely steering with one hand in order to make angry gestures at him with the other.
* So says Google, which, we've learned, will convert other measurements to Smoots if you so desire. For instance, its calculator function tells us that this humble Buzz correspondent is 0.96641791Smoots tall.
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