Asteroid the size of 100 hot dogs to pass Earth on Monday - NASA

Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.orgmod to Space@beehaw.org – 53 points –
Asteroid the size of 100 hot dogs to pass Earth on Monday - NASA
jpost.com
32

A absurd grump for an absurd headline: What toasts my buns about this article is that it uses hot dogs as a unit of “size” when it really means length. The asteroid is actually the size of millions of hotdogs, because asteroids and hotdogs are both three-dimensional.

I actually first assumed that they meant three dimensional volume when I read "size" and wondered how we saw such a tiny comet. Quite confusing (read: bad) choice of title...

Obligatory "Americans will use everything but the metric system" joke aside, I wonder how astronomers can even discover an asteroid this small.

The "size" of 100 hot dogs is misleading. It is not a pile of 100 hot dogs to demonstrate the volume of the asteroid, but a line of 100 hot dogs to demonstrate the diameter, which is 16 meters. So in volume, this is a lot more than 100 hot dogs!

And here I was thinking that it was 100 hotdogs lined up end-to-end. What a deceptive headline!

Who the hell measures anything in hotdogs? I've lived in America my whole life, and I've never heard anything but the Nathan's Hotdog Eating record measured in hotdogs.

This is a wild article. Someone please tell me it was written by AI. 😶

I love that this headline is followed by the "moderator" and "admin" tags by OP so that it looks even more official. Like yes, this is a normal unit of measurement, so says the admin lol

Quick somebody call Joey Chestnut! Only he can save us!

Is this going to be the Beehaw version of "banana for scale"?

This was a thing on Reddit as well.

I think it came from the headlines in a few articles that would say things like an asteroid the size of a car… and an asteroid the size of an elephant and two giraffes.

I think after a while it became an accepted meme to just report the size of the asteroid by comparing it to something random instead of just posting the metric size.

This asteroid is just some kind of elaborate marketing stunt for Armageddon 2, starring Joey Chestnut.

Joey Chestnut: "Wait, wouldn't it make more sense just to train experienced astronauts how to eat competitively instead of the other way around?"

Michael Bay: "Shut the fuck up!"

What size hotdog we talking about here? NASA: Hotdog the size of 50 beans