Why bother with meters, seconds, grams, and Celsius? Everything you need to measure all physical quantities is right there on your kitchen table. That's right: it's time to recognize the most superior measurement system ever created: Cookie Internationale. SI and metric are great when you need precision, but what's precision without accuracy? That's where CI comes in. Instead of:
7.99993 x 10-7 meters, try
"smaller than a cookie."
It should become immediately apparent that the Cookie should replace the meter--the speed and accuracy with which one can measure are a quantum leap ahead of conventional European methods! But the cookie has even more tricks up its metaphorical sleeve. You can forget compound units! Speed isn't "cookies per second"--it's simply "faster/slower than a cookie." Density is no longer "grams per cubic meter," and doesn't even convert to "cookies per cubic cookie": it's simply "greater/lesser than a cookie"! Starting to get the pattern? Great! Let's try a gedankenexperiment.
A nice cold
beer, served to you in any bar in the world, can be measured as:
And when one drops a cookie, with the flat side down, from a height of one cookie, one gets the time unit "cookie", as well as measurements of velocity and acceleration ("cookie" and "cookie", respectively) which allows one to measure the beer in question even further:
- less velocity than a cookie, in all directions
- equal acceleration to a cookie
- time to drink said beer: greater than a cookie
- and on, and on, and on!
This measurement system doesn't offer the cold comfort of precision, but it gives you truly binary accuracy! A measurement can be proven true or false--often without even having a standard cookie on-hand--in a matter of cookies. What could be easier? Scientists will save millions of cookies in research funding, previously wasted on machines that measured the outcome of their experiments in arbitrary units tied to silly, difficult-to-measure things like the Xenon atom, or air pressure at sea level! Why measure tire pressure in atmospheres? Your tire needs to be filled with a volume of air greater than a cookie; the tire needs to be able to support a weight greater than a cookie without deflecting more than a cookie! Do you think I went out to my car to measure? Of course not! My car is farther away than a cookie, and it would take me longer than a cookie to go out and measure!
Switch to Cookie Internationale today, and never worry about accurate measurements again!
By way of explanation, this system of units was devised by a high school roommate of mine who went on to become a math major. The Standard Cookie was a generic branded Chips Ahoy! clone, served every Wednesday night at St. Andrew's by one's dorm parents. He picked the Standard Cookie for its exceedingly round shape, its uniform density, and its lack of crumbs--after all, if the cookie's mass changed, it wouldn't be standardized! He wrapped it in clear plastic and thumb tacked it to his bulletin board. He briefly considered mailing the standard cookie to Switzerland, where the meter, angstrom, and hogshead are kept, but realized that those Philistines would never realize the genius of such a simple system.