Talk:2733: Size Comparisons

But Texas isn't even the largest US State. It's the second largest state, behind Alaska. Mind you, if you took Alaska and divided it into two then Texas would no longer be in second place... It would now be third! 172.71.242.203 02:11, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

LOL, poor Texans. I'm from Australia. We only have 6 states, and 4 of them are bigger than Texas. So Texas would be in the smallest 50% of states if it was part of Australia Boatster (talk) 14:01, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

I started an explanation. My first, so I hope it's OK. Notice how I resisted [Citation needed]. Nitpicking (talk) 03:20, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

... and ninjaed. Nitpicking (talk) 03:21, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Fixed the beginning, now it says Texas is the second-largest state. WhatDoWeDoNow (talk) 03:29, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Alaska isn't usually considered part of the "contiguous US", so Texas is indeed first there. Barmar (talk) 03:39, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Whoops, didn't see that. Sorry! WhatDoWeDoNow (talk) 19:09, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

2082:_Mercator_Projection: If you drive north from the Pacific northwest you actually cross directly into Alaska 172.70.214.204 20:46, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Note that if you scale Rhode Island up to the size of the Solar System, the ants would be even larger. Jordan Brown (talk) 06:46, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Trivia: In Germany we like to compare big things to the size of the Saarland, the smallest federal state that is not a city state. But since it is also the state with the least people living in it almost noone really knows how big the Saarland really is (and of the rest noone really cares to find out). This reminds me a lot of this Texas vs. Alaska discussion and I wonder if every country has something like this...? --172.71.160.39 07:44, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

In the UK, at a certain range of scale our general comparison standard is (half/three times /etc) "the size of Wales". e.g. the quantity of rainforest that is doomed, at any particular time. There are a lot of people there (often, according to the Welsh themselves, too many English incomers) and it is usefully easy to identify (I think of it as the "head of the pig that the gnome is riding", but that might just be me), given its prominant appearance in the outline of Great Britain itself. Usually! 172.70.85.81 08:51, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

In Australia we seem compelled to use Sydney Harbour as the unit of measurement for any large amount of waterBoatster (talk) 13:57, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

And when we don't compare to the size of states, we usually use sports fields. "football fields" is a frequent unit of measurement in the media. Barmar (talk) 15:13, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Oh, yes, football fields (association football, aka. soccer) are popular here, too, but less controversial as they are always roughly 100 by 50 meters in size. --172.71.160.37 05:46, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I just started a similar conversation, where we started discussing comparing the size of something with the size of an Olympic Swimming Pool, which is 25x50 meters, but never spoken like that in the US, because, metric. :) The volume can vary, since it might be somewhere between 2 and 3 meters deep, but is also often used for a tangible volume of things. RandalSchwartz (talk) 22:40, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

Although I suspect a good number of people don't really have a firm grasp of the size of Wales - I think there's often a tendency to picture it as everything west of a straight line running from somewhere around the Mersey down to around Gloucester, thus making it about 1/4 - 1/3 bigger by lumping in chunks of Cheshire, Shropshire, and Gloucestershire, and most of Herefordshire.172.71.242.191 10:37, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Bear in mind that much more of Britain was 'Welsh' before the Saxons barged in, so you could cut them some slack. The faithful following of the current subnational boundary is one option, but you could imagine many other abstractions that don't vastly change things. I'm sure some people would Offa a completely different line for your consideration... 141.101.98.144 17:52, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Notably, the larger the state you scale up the smaller the ants will be, as you would have to scale it by a smaller factor. The comparison would be more accurate if it read: "Texas is so big that if you expanded it to the size of the Solar System, the ants there would "only* be as big as Rhode Island." Svízel přítula (talk) 10:31, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Wait, Jordan Brown already said that. Svízel přítula (talk) 10:32, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

I just barely resisted changing the "Dallas" wikipedia link to point to the page for the TV show. Barmar (talk) 15:11, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

A note that, in an edit I just made, amongst other things I went through and (hopefully) clarified the style of the area measurements. (Though only assuming that they were numerically correct... Didn't check!) If you say "N kilometres squared", this can be so easily taken/meant as "(N km)²", rather than "N square kilometres", which is "N (km²)". Both areas, but different. Just like the volume described as "10 centimetres cubed" would also be "1000 cubic centimetres". (In both cases being 1 litre).
The easy confusion coming from the "km²" unit which you will read straight as "kilometres squared". And a single one is a "kilometre squared", before being given a number as some multiple of "kilometre squared"s, but that generally aint the same as a "multiple of kilometres" squared. So it is instead best to word it (if you do that at all) as "(a multiple of) square kilometres".
((Next up, I shall probably go on to explain the technical difference between "degrees Kelvin", °K (or alternately as required for the scales Centigrade, Fahrenheit, Rankine, Delisle, whatever), and "Kelvin degrees", K°... ;) ))
Oh and, don't worry. Though I used the international version of "litre", etc, above, I tried to make sure I use the American-type spelling in the article itself, despite all my British instincts and natural preference... Just that here I couldn't.conscuously stand to write it 'wrongly' in my own far more personalised bit of prose. :P 172.70.86.31 17:06, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Trolling, right? Degrees Kelvin isn't a thing. Jkshapiro (talk) 02:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

It was before 1967. (And I never personally understood why the change, when you still have degrees of every other temperature measure, including the similarly origined Rankine. Plus others like Réaumur, Rømer, Newton and Wedgwood which you'd expect would cause all types of confusion.) 141.101.98.19 05:09, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

If Texas were expanded to the size of the solar system, the size of an ant would not change. The size of objects is not affected by changes in scale of the surrounding environment. An ant would still be the same size relative to Texas as it would be relative to the solar system.chatgpt

It is clearly assumed in the comic that the ants of Texas would be scaled proportionally to Texas. So where these scaled ants would gave the same relative size to the scaled Texas, they would now be as large as Rhode Island compared to the not scaled Texas! --Kynde (talk) 13:47, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Hey, couldn't the joke also be that ant sizes don't really change around states, and so it would be a bad comparison because it doesn't tell you about the size of Texas at all? ||10:33, February 4 2023 (PST)

No. If you scaled any other state of the contiguous US up to the size of the solar system, the ants would be even bigger since the other states are smaller than Texas and thus the scaling factor would be larger --Kynde (talk) 13:47, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Texas is 733 miles across. The solar system is 3.88 billion miles across. A black ant is about 1/3 cm long. This means an ant scammed up by the same factor would be a little less than half the size of Rhode Island. 172.71.254.135 17:25, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Neptune's orbital radius is a tad under 3 billion miles, meaning the diameter of it, alone, is 6ish billion miles in size (then add Kuiper, to taste, before even considering the Oort cloud). Even on your figures, though, there are many sizes of ant, including ones roughly twice the size of your example. 141.101.99.121 18:32, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

The first paragraph explains how Cueball uses a size comparison to fail to show the size of Texas, and how if the subjects were inverted it would actually make sense. The second paragraph explains (again but badly this time) that Cueball is...using a size comparison to fail to show the size of Texas. The last paragraph of the article says that if the comparison were inverted it would actually make sense...which was already covered in the first paragraph. --Raviolio (talk) 16:23, 12 January 2024 (UTC)