As Big as a Barn?

ABSTRACT

Taking measure of measurement
The Texas rancher is trying to impress the English farmer with the size of his property. "I can drive out at dawn across my land, and by sundown I still haven't reached my ranch's borders." The Englishman nods sympathetically and says, "Yes, yes, I know what you mean - I have a car like that, too."

REFERENCES

• 1: Vladimir Nabokov's favorite Vanessa atalanta. Whether Red Admirable is a playful version of Red Admiral or vice versa is uncertain.
• 2: Gotcha! The rod, pole, and perch each represents the same, presumably important length, namely 16.5 feet, 5.5 yards, or 0.25 chains. The chain is a fundamental, universal constant---namely, the length of a standard cricket pitch. Cricket is a game formerly played in the UK but now confined to her colonies.
• 3: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/MetrizableTopology.html. Incidentally, the overblown use of the term topology when describing simple network layouts is not strictly incorrect but still damned irritating to real topologists.
• 4: Halloway, M., Baker, C. 1972. Physics Today (July). The barn is not the kind of area with which to measure your curtains. In fact, B = R/I, where I is the number of incident particles per unit time per unit area; and R is the number of reactions per unit time per nucleus. R/I clearly has dimension d² (area) = {(t^-1)/((t^-1)*(d^-2)) where t is time}.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Measurement techniques

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.8 Metrics

General Terms:
Measurement