| Date: | April 18, 2007 / year-entry #136 |
| Tags: | non-computer |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20070418-01/?p=27193 |
| Comments: | 16 |
| Summary: | Pea, marble, dime, nickel, quarter, half dollar, walnut, golf ball, hen egg, tennis ball, baseball, teacup, grapefruit, softball. What is this a list of? Answer. Note that the list is different in Britain. (Original story that tipped me off to this list.) |
Pea, marble, dime, nickel, quarter, half dollar, walnut, golf ball, hen egg, tennis ball, baseball, teacup, grapefruit, softball. What is this a list of? Answer. Note that the list is different in Britain. (Original story that tipped me off to this list.) |
Comments (16)
Comments are closed. |
I realized that the apparent diameter was increasing as you progressed through the list.
But until following the link I hadn’t associated it with reported sizes of hail.
(Although in retrospect I have heard many of those terms used to describe hail pellet size)
I’m such a weather geek. I knew the answer even before I got done with the list.
I don’t know if I should be happy or sad.
I live in South Dakota, we are quite familiar with hail here.
When I lived in Sydney I lived through this:
http://www.bom.gov.au/weather/nsw/sevwx/14april1999.shtml
For those unfamiliar with cricket, the cricket ball pictured is about the same size as a tennis ball.
The whole area I lived in looked like a driving range after that.
I was going to say "tumor sizes"
I’ve been to several NWS weather spotter classes and the instructor always directs spotters to never use "marble" to describe the size hail. To prove the point, the instructor brings out a bag marbles to show that their size can very from 1/2" to 7/8". This makes it impossible to determine whether the hail is severe (> 3/4").
The instructor recommends always using coin sizes to report hail size.
Things that you eat?
I’ve never heard "hen egg" or "tea cup" used to describe hail, but everything else is familiar.
When people around here (Midwest) say "marble" they’re usually thinking about the 1/4" variety. That’s one of those cases where most people understand what is meant even though there are a large number of variations.
I saw half-dollar sized hail once. I can’t imagine the damage from grapefruit sized hail.
I would have said "gravel".
I realized what it was when I got to ‘baseball’ and ‘softball’, but then I spent some time in Kansas, and baseball-sized hail was in the news this week (texas?)
The worst hail I saw was golfball. It was extremely noisy, but only about one hailstone per second fell in a 4×4 meter area. So if one were totally stupid, one could walk through the hailstorm with a very decent chance of being unharmed.
Whew! I was afraid that it was items retrieved from people’s rectums in the emergency room.
The US currency centric list includes Teacup while the British one doesn’t…
….the Brits also appear keen on providing options…
….Mothballs were the biggest hailstones I saw in 36 yrs in the UK, I guess more remote parts of the Empire saw some Melons….
I posted <a href="http://staringatemptypages.blogspot.com/2006/08/math-of-hailstones.html">this blog entry</a> about the NPR item back in August, when it aired.
Durn. The HTML doesn’t work. Maybe just the link, then:
http://staringatemptypages.blogspot.com/2006/08/math-of-hailstones.html
Wendy: over here in the west midlands, just over a year ago, we had some that I’d classify as walnuts. But, yeah, other than that I’d agree with not getting much beyond ‘mothball’. Most of the hail I see is too small to even classify as ‘pea’.