A matter of scale
Do you want your name to still be known centuries hence? In a good way? That’s not used to frighten children? Do you want to be an answer to a question asked in school? A question that is not ‘who do we avoid if he’s hanging round the gates?’ Do you want to leave a lasting legacy of your time on the planet?
If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.
And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure. Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.
For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date). So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.
A word of warning however. Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two. Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps. Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.
So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.
For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale. By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.
I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson. The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).
Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement. The metric equivalent is The Farage.
There is a demand for this. Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites. How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.
*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified. For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents. What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called? Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.
If you do, then the solution is not, as you might think, to squeeze into a two-sizes-too-small sequinned costume made by your nan, polish up your sad story and humiliate yourself on a prime-time talent show, but to get yourself into the shed and start inventing a unit of measurement.
And here’s the really great part, it doesn’t even matter if there is already a unit of measurement for the thing you are trying to measure. Distance and temperature for instance both have two different units of measurement, so surely there’s no bar to preventing you assigning a new unit of measurement for something that already has one.
For example, the heat of chillies is measured using the Scoville scale, which goes from ‘no significant heat’ (supermarket chilli con carne) to 2,000,000 (police pepper spray, any spicy food consumed on a first date). So an alternative and possibly a more useful scale would be to go Beaufort and assign behaviours to the heat, all the way from ‘adding pepper to the dish to make it more exciting’, through ‘blowing out of cheeks’, ‘sweating’, ‘comically reaching for your neighbour’s beer and downing it in one’ to ‘shitting fire’.
A word of warning however. Do not be tempted to go down the ‘more is better’ route and assign a third unit of measurement to something that already has two. Nobody in the pub is going to be impressed that you ran twenty-eight Jamteks in half an Astard the other day, or helped by an instruction that for best results, cook at fifteen Quolons for eighty Parps. Doing this will either leave people baffled, or thinking you are a twat rather than a guy so clever he looks like he’s smoking a pipe…even when he’s not.
So, basic rule of thumb*, try and avoid anything that sounds like it’s lifted from a crap science fiction novel.
For best results then, you need to quantify something that has yet to be attributed a scale. By measuring the reaction of a cross section of the public to stimulus – let’s say, a BBC news broadcast - then monitoring the flush reaction to the ears, blood pressure, heart rate, frequency of composing furious letters to the editor and so on, it must be possible to clinically measure levels of indignation.
I propose that indignation be measured in units of Clarkson. The maximum amount of indignation any one person is capable of is One Clarkson and the great thing about the Clarkson Scale is that it can not only measure specific points of indignity (Daily Mail reader learning that his tax money is spent subsidising opera – one eighth of a Clarkson) but is an effective measure of background indignation (Daily Mail reader alone with their crazy thoughts, one seventieth of a Clarkson).
Naturally, The Clarkson is an imperial measurement. The metric equivalent is The Farage.
There is a demand for this. Society is increasingly demanding that, increasingly, things are increasingly quantified in an increasingly simple way for presentation in the media and, increasingly, on social networking sites. How increasingly I have no idea, but somebody is, I hope, toiling in their shed right now to quantify that.
*You can, if you so wish, seek to quantify the rule of thumb or anything else that has so far gone unquantified. For instance, while I would not be at all surprised if the perfume industry has a measurement of pungency of aroma (parts per million or something), this may work well for traditional scents like citrus or whatever but has yet, as far as I am aware, to be applied to celebrity scents. What exactly is the amount of Beyonce in each bottle of ‘bouncy’ or whatever her celeb fragrance is called? Lasting fame awaits the person who can nail that one.
Labels: Celebrity, Education, Fame, Jeremy Clarkson, Measurement, Nigel Farage
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