Aerosmith on standby...

Isreal is on the metric system, right? I'm not judging or anything. We Americans, along with Myanmar, and Liberia, use a preposterous system based on a medieval King's foot. But what I want to know is what's up with The Jerusalem Post's ludicrous units of measurement?

Who says journalism is dead?

Incidentally, why is it our national bird? It's an
opportunistic scavenger who-oh. Oh...I get it.

Like I said, I'm a United Statesian have and never been to Israel and don't read the Jerusalem Post often enough to know if this is normal. And I'm not an astronomer, so for all I know describing the size of asteroids using marine mammals for scale is de rigueur, but then like three days later they referred to another asteroid as being the size of twenty bald eagles and so I have questions. Is it like naming a hurricane? Like, each new asteroid gets a different animal? And what's the exchange rate? How many bald eagles to a walrus? And why the bald eagle? Isn't it kind of our national bird? 

I just have no context for either of these units of measurement. That is to say, to my knowledge, a ball of eighteen walruses has never collided with the earth at great speed, so I don't know what kind of damage to expect. 

Like, do we need to assemble a rag-tag team? Does Aerosmith
need to get cracking on a new glam rock ballad?

End-to-end? Stacked up? What?

The article clarifies that in this case eighteen walruses refers to the diameter of asteroid 2023 JK, and not the weight, which to my non-astronomer mind would have been the greater concern, but what do I know? In anycase, you'll be relived to hear that 2023 JK blew past us as did 2023 JL2 and 2023 HG11 which the Post describes as being around fifteen Honda Civics and three bottlenose dolphins respectively. Although had there been a danger of an impact, we'd be completely unprepared if we only had the Jerusalem Post to tell us about it.

Interestingly it turns out that in the more recent article they were giving us shit for not using the metric system, which is fair, if a bit rude. They were describing astroid 2023 JK3 using bald eagles at us. But the earlier use of a walrus-based system of measurement was just them being cute. And, I don't know, if an asteroid were headed our way, accurate information seems more appropriate than funny, funny jokes about our inability and unwillingness to get on team metric system. 

On the other hand, the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was something
like fifteen kilometers in dimeter, and that's only nine miles. Which is less.
So in many ways, the metric system has its shortcomings too.