History Main / HiroshimaAsAUnitOfMeasure

* Prehistoric animals will usually be compared, either in overall size, or in some specific measurement (i.e. bite force, tooth size), to ''UsefulNotes/TyrannosaurusRex''. Smaller dinos will be compared to chickens.

* Intelligence in non-humans is measured in terms of human age, i.e., "Dogs have the intelligence of a three-year-old child," despite this not being an accurate assessment of animal intelligence.

* In ''VideoGame/PlagueInc'', your plague is measured by these, comparing the infectitivy and death rates to the rate real life diseases spread and killed, such as HIV, [[UsefulNotes/TheSpanishFlu Spanish Flu]], or the common cold.

* ''WebVideo/DragonBallZAbridged'':
** It has a RunningGag with Vegeta using ButtMonkey Raditz's power level of 1200 as a unit of measurement during the Vegeta arc. For the record, Nappa is worth 5 Raditz, while Vegeta himself is worth 15.
** When Vegeta and Nappa start growing Saibamen, Vegeta comments that their power level is the same as Raditz's, so that they can literally grow Raditzes. Cut to Raditz going "I. Hate. '''ALL OF YOU'''."
** Later on "Raditz" [[RuleOfFunny somehow]] starts being used as a ''currency''; the fast-food restaurant [[SpaceX Spacey's]] even has a "Raditz Menu".

[[folder:Print Media]]
* Forbes Magazine once calculated the wealth of the world's richest billionaires, [[http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/04/23/how-much-is-a-dragon-worth-revisited/ in units of Smaug's Dragon Hoard]] from ''Literature/TheHobbit''.
* ''New Scientist'''s "Feedback" column likes keeping track of these units, occasionally responding to the odder ones by asking "but what's that in elephants?"
[[/folder]]

* ''Advanced'' ''TabletopGame/DungeonsAndDragons'', 1st Edition, used the gold piece as a unit of weight. Your carrying capacity, the lifting power of a ''telekinesis'' spell, the load limit of ''Tenser's floating disc'', etc. -- all these were given in units of gold pieces rather than pounds. (At the time, 1 gold piece weighed 1/10 of a pound, so converting between pounds and gold pieces was rather easy, although it did make for some ridiculously heavy coins. When 2nd Edition came out, the weight of 1 gold piece changed to 1/50 of a pound and the notion of listing weight in g.p. was abandoned.)

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* ''WebAnimation/DeathBattle'' is justified in doing this as some of the calculation for the feats done by combatants enter frankly absurd numbers. Usually measured in "____tons of TNT" (kilotons, gigatons, etc.)
** Exaggerated with ''Hulk vs Broly'', where the combatants are so absurdly powerful that ''our universe'' has to be used as a unit of measure to describe their destructive power.

* In video games (especially {{Fighting Game}}s), short measurements of time (usually no more than a second or two) are often measured in "frames", or refreshes of the screen (e.g. "This character's attack is 15 frames long"), where one frame is typically 1/60th of a second, corresponding to the number or times per second that screens traditionally refresh in NTSC-based countries. However, this does run into a few problems:
** In PAL-based countries, screens traditionally refresh 50 times instead. So if, for example, you're from North America and you describe something as "8 frames" long to someone in Europe, they may assume you are saying that it's 0.16 seconds long when it's really 0.1333... seconds. Other non-60Hz refresh rates exist as well: many sprite-based arcade games actually run at slightly under 60 Hz (usually something like 58 or 59 Hz), and there are high-end [=TVs=] that refresh at 120 Hz and gaming monitors that refresh at 144 Hz.
** If the game gets too taxing on the hardware, one of two things will happen that alters what a frame means. Either the game will slow down in order to keep showing every frame, making one frame last longer (so one frame is now something like 1/30th or 1/20th of a second), or the game will skip frames in order to stay at a consistent speed, meaning that, for example, frame 1 is shown, but then you see frame 5 next because the hardware was too busy keeping up to show frames 2-4, so what appears to be just two frames is actually five frames elapsed.

* Despite stronger metals existing for a long time (like tungsten carbide and carbon steel), compressive and tensile strength is still compared to steel (e.g. spider's silk/nylon/carbon fiber is X times stronger than steel). Sometimes compressive strength is compared to concrete.

* In the US, hail is never described in terms of it's actual size. You will never hear the weather guy on the TV describe "quarter-inch hail". Hail is always described in Hiroshima-style measures--dime-sized hail, quarter-sized hail, golf-ball sized hail, tennis-ball sized hail, etc.

* Especially on the internet, the ''Literature/HarryPotter'' series (or sometimes just the longest of the books, ''Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'') is used as measure of length of fanfics and other works of literature. Not only is it something a lot of readers are familiar with, it coincidentally is only just north of a million words (specifically 1,084,170), making it a nice measuring stick. ''Literature/AtlasShrugged'' and ''Literature/WarAndPeace'' are also popular when describing the length of door stoppers.

* In ''Series/{{Chernobyl}}'', once accurate readings of the radiation levels are taken, Legasov points out that the fire is emitting the equivalent of two Hiroshimas. Every hour. And it's been burning for 20 hours already, and will burn for ''months''.

* ''VideoGame/KatamariDamacy'' uses this form of measurement to illustrate the size of your katamaris.

* Prehistoric animals will usually be compared, either in overall size, or in some specific measurement (i.e. bite force, tooth size), to ''TyrannosaurusRex''. Smaller dinos will be compared to chickens.

* The yield of cataclysmic explosions is frequently measured in terms of number of Hiroshima equivalent.

* In the ''VideoGame/GeometryDash'' Impossible Levels community, the level "Sloom", by HaydenDom, has often been used as a memetic measurement of level badness, as it is considered one of the worst decorated levels on the Impossible Levels List.

* Happens to a lesser degree (of both extremity and known-ness) in ''WebVideo/LoadingReadyLive'' #34's Wasabi Roulette. When told half of the replacement dishes have "extra wasabi", Paul's understandable question is "How much extra?" Alex gives his response as "''Heather'' wasabi."

* ''WebAnimation/DeathBattle'' is justified in doing this as some of the calculation for the feats done by combatants enter frankly absurd numbers.

* Prehistoric animals will usually be compared, either in overall size, or in some specific measurement (i.e. bite force, tooth size), to ''TyrannosaurusRex''.

* ''Series/PlanetOfDinosaurs'' did this straight ''three'' times. The Meteor Crater was made by a rock which hit the Earth with an impact like 4 Hiroshima bombs; TheTunguskaEvent (1908, in Siberia) was provoked by a mysterious body with a power of 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs; finally, the iconic meteorite of the End Cretaceous with its [[UpToEleven 100,000,000]] Hiroshima bombs.

* The documentary ''Series/WalkingWithDinosaurs'' mentions the meteorite at the end of the Cretaceous as "hitting the Earth with a power of 100,000,000 Hiroshima bombs".

* Height will be measured in Empire State Buildings, Eiffel Towers, or Pyramids of Giza. Really big heights will be compared with Mt. Everest or any of the other famous mountains (Denali, K2, Anapurna, Matterhorn, etc).
* Volume and concentration will be measured in Olympic swimming pools.

* Theoretical physicists frequently write their equations in terms of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units Planck units]], units derived by setting each of 5 fundamental constants of the universe equal to 1. While these units have the distinction of being "natural," in that they're not bound to an arbitrary quantity like the size of the Earth or the mass/oscillation speed of a particular atom, their magnitudes make them completely impractical for everyday measurements. The Planck unit of length, for example, is about a hundred-quadrillionth the width of a proton, and the Planck unit of temperature is about 10^25 times the core temperature of the sun.

## contrasting against the price tag of some known to be pricey, usually impressive military, objects, like ''Nimitz''-class aircraft carriers

* Intelligence in non-humans is measured in terms of human age, i.e., "Dogs have the intelligence of a three-year-old child."