Comment by damnitbuilds
12 hours ago
"Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth — or about the height of two-and-a-half Napoleon Bonapartes standing on top of one another."
Way to get history wrong in your story about history.
12 hours ago
"Twenty centuries are stacked in 4 meters (13 feet) of earth — or about the height of two-and-a-half Napoleon Bonapartes standing on top of one another."
Way to get history wrong in your story about history.
I actually was about to post this quote for another reason as well. Usually you make these references to “known sizes” so people can relate. But no one has seen Napoleon in the flesh _and_ they underestimate his size. This was a useless comparison.
That said, the dig itself is pretty cool and I’m excited to see what they’ll unearth. I’m pretty interested in Roman history but haven’t gone as deep into the history of the provinces.
Semi-related to that, if someone reading this is in the Toronto area, the bata shoe museum has an exhibit (Vindolanda) about unearthed Roman footwear in England
The author should’ve known that we already have an accepted unit for measuring things in terms of a person’s stature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
The quip suggests he was 1.6 m tall. The best guess is in fact 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in), so it's not that far off.
Or about 1/27th of a football field for the Americans
The classic American height reference would make it, depending how you're counting, 1/100 of an Empire State Building.
It's about two and a half Ford Tauri stacked on top of each other
>It's about two and a half Ford Tauri stacked on top of each other
Or almost exactly one Companhia worth of Tauri stacked on top of each other.
(there's a programming joke in there btw)
Comparing a height to a distance is pretty silly, for Americans and non-Americans alike. Also it's much closer to 1/23rd than 1/27th.