Everyone who’s dealt with kids knows you have to bisect the giraffe equally from nose to tail so everyone gets 2 legs, or somebody will cry that it’s unfair.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Everyone who deals with scientists knows they assume a perfectly spherical, frictionless, giraffe.
In a vacuum
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I let one cut and the other gets to pick first.
This is the way. And from experience, it will result in sub-nanometer size differences.
Kids are total commies.
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Even if you think height divided by two, why even describe it that way? Giraffes are tall, but not so unfathomably tall that something half its size is incomprehensible. That’s 7-9ish feet. You couldn’t say the size of Andre the Giant?
The Youth Today don't know who that is. Then again, do they know how large a giraffe is? We may never know.
Then again, do they know how large a giraffe is?
Just today, I learned a handy way of visualizing the size of a giraffe. If you took that asteroid that struck off the coast of Iceland, and made a copy of it and put the two of them together, that's about the size of a giraffe.
If that doesn't get you some Nobel prize, I don't know what will.
People usually measure asteroids by mass (but then, those people are already abnormal, so who knows?), if so, it's something around the size of a cow.
Or maybe they could use metric...
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This is why real scientists use the only reasonable real world measurement - a perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum.
americans be using anything but the metric system
Daily Mail is British
But they're the sort of British that yearns for the good old days, when we still had shillings and inches and diphtheria and jumpers for goalposts and no womens' rights and all that great British stuff.
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Dear gods
How far will these Americans go to not use the metric system... ffs
Sadly they’re not American. Containment has been breached.
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One standard volume giraffe of course, i.e. the volume in m³ an average giraffe would fill (at room temperature and sea level), when passed through a blender. And then half of that
The scientists had to go through many more proportionate animals before discovering that half a giraffe was a near perfect match for the size of the asteroid.
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Also, most people dont even have a good grasp on how big giraffes are anyways!
I once went to a zoo that had an elevated platform extending into the giraffe's habitat so that you could stand face to face with them. Their heads are as big as a normal human, like 5 feet from crown to chin!
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I love it when I can understand your memes!
Ask questions when you do not. :)
Oh I wouldn’t begin to know what to even ask. I’m a music major lol. But if I think of something, I’ll pipe up.
Start with where you are, others will be there too. :)
Thanks! I’ll do that.
So like the size of a horse?
The average horse is about half the height and weight of the average giraffe. Giraffes are just a really bad unit of measurement, males weight about 400kg more than females and there is a wide height difference over their global population, they are technically four different species we just all call giraffe 🦒
I was just going to say, what kind of weird ass size comparison is that. It’s almost as egregious as saying “half the size of two apples”.
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Reads Daily Mail clickbait, proceeds to blame "scientists"
The Daily Mail readership will not fathom your question. It is a rag for those who would follow MAGA but want to appear intelligent without have either the natural talent or putting in any work to increase knowledge. Baseline racism is a requirement
And is it half the volume, mass or a dimension? Because I've never tried neither blending or carrying a giraffe before (I never got invited to those parties in uni) so I have no grasp on volume or mass.
Surely a giraffe is nearly uniform density making the distinction between volume and mass irrelevant
Assume a spherical giraffe.
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In other words, a large boulder the size of a small boulder
The anatomical answer is sagitally down the midline.
I’m surprised they didn’t use immigrants as the unit.
I don't get why Americans are doing their best to avoid the metric system. It's always weird discriptions. Like dishwashers, or in this case, half a giraffe. Just use bananas if (cubic) meters are too complex.
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It's not the scientists, it's a single journalist who is popping out these headlines. Some of those caught attention.
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