Banana for Scale

Why do Americans measure everything in football fields, school buses, blue whales, and Olympic-sized swimming pools instead of just using actual units of measurement? This week on Between the States, we dive into the weirdest ways people describe size, distance, weight, and volume, and attempt to make all of them even more useful by converting them into the internet’s greatest unit of measurement: bananas for scale. How many bananas long is a school bus? How many bananas tall is the Empire State Building? How many bananas fit into an Olympic-sized swimming pool? We work our way from blue whales, elephants, football fields, and the Eiffel Tower all the way down to human hairs, lice, and microscopic viruses. Along the way, we get sidetracked by the size of the Hubble Space Telescope, asteroid measurements, the deepest point in the ocean, how much gold humanity has mined, walking around the Earth on a path made of LEGO bricks, what liquid you would fill an Olympic swimming pool with if you had to swim through it, and whether the speed of light actually works the way Noel thinks it does. It’s an episode about weird American measurements, bananas for scale, the metric system vs. imperial system, strange units of measurement, internet measurement memes, football field comparisons, Olympic swimming pools, school buses, blue whales, the Empire State Building, and why humans will use almost anything as a unit of measurement except a ruler. Send us Fan Mail Support the show Episodes available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BetweenTheStates Follow us on Social Media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Between-The-States/61574045351917/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/betweenthestatespod/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@betweenthestates BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/betweenthestates.bsky.social Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetweenTheStates/ Comments, questions, or suggestions can be sent to: [email protected] Best way to support the show: https://www.patreon.com/BetweentheStates