Are the elephants bulls, cows, or a mixture? African elephants exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism. Female Loxodonta africana mass between 1 and 1.5 tonnes and males between 2 and 3 tonnes. 640 "African elephants" is somewhere between 2.6x10^6 kg and 3.8x10^6 kg depending on the sex mixture of the herd, a range of 6000 tonnes. That's the equivalent mass of over 30 American football fields filled with pickup trucks. Hardly negligible.

They are, of course, using the standard African Elephant as a measure, the same way you are using the standard pickup truck as a measure.

And of course if you ever talk about bovines you will have to use the standard spherical cow as a measure.

I based my allegory on the fact that an F-150 without truckticles is the same size as one that sports them.

As for the spherical cow, is that a metric sphere or a US customary sphere?

> African elephants exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism.

For a mammal, maybe. For the rest of Animalia that’s not extreme at all.

(1.2×10^6 to 4×10^6) kg/cm^2

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=weight+of+640+African+...

Unfortunately Wolfram Alpha does not know the area of the tip of a ballet shoe.

Nor do I, nor I imagine many others, which makes this supposedly layman friendly term a wide miss.

~2cm x 5cm seems reasonable for the tip of a ballet shoe, so I'd say about 10 to 15cm^2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointe_shoe

That part of a pointe shoe is called the platform it’s size and shape varies greatly based on the type and size of the shoe and the box (the part of the shoe where your toes sit in).

For most pointe shoes with a rounded platform there is much less than 10cm squared of contact.

You can safely assume a tip of a ballet shoe has around 2 x 2 cm so 4 square centimeters as area.

At least we don't have to wonder whether they meant African or European elephants.

> What's the problem with something concrete like kg/sqcm

kg isn't a measure of force. And the world will be a nicer place once we retire the oddball prefixes of centi, deci, deka, and hecto.

> And the world will be a nicer place once we retire the oddball prefixes of centi, deci, deka, and hecto.

Why? Is that just so we have fewer things to remember, or is there a more obvious benefit I'm missing?

Just to be more consistent with the rest of the prefixes, which are all (integer) powers of 1,000. And because engineering notation is a thing. And because we normally group digits by the thousands (e.g. 1,000,000). Curious if anyone has come across a mechanical drawing or electrical schematic with oddball units like cm, hN-m, or deciFarads, daOhms and the like (daPa, hH).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_notation

Fewer things to remember is important because humans are useless at that. Hardly anyone will have an intuition for how much pressure a kg/cm^2 is as well as a N/cm^2 and a N/mm^2 and a kg/mm^2 and a kg/m^2 and PSI and a kPa ...

... because a sizeable portion of readers enjoy a tangible metaphor for perspective.

The concrete number while it would be nice to include is a lot less helpful for the average reader than something more illustrative like the elephant number.

Pretty sure "X times atmospheric pressure" would be a lot easier to understand for the average reader than what they came up with.

Frankly, I doubt it.

I can roughly envision a giant pile of elephants exerting force on a tiny patch of ground better than I can interpret PSI or atmospheres.

The point is not to convey an exact amount. It is to say “it’s a shitload”.

Is space really so limited they couldn’t afford to mention both?

Clearly those elephants took up all the space, leaving nothing over for anything else.