When I was studying at the university, every year before the start of the academic year a soapbox car race took place in the slope leading up to the main campus. This was arranged by the computer science students, so one of the rules was the, in my opinion quite funny, nerd joke that went something like “there are limits on the dimensions of the car – they are not allowed to exceed three”.
Now, the other day I came upon the Wikipedia entry on Knock Nevis, the largest ship ever built – with “large” defined as “long”. That page has a thought-provoking graphic comparing the length of this ship with some of the tallest building in the world. Here’s my spiffed up version of it:
So if you were to stand on top of the bow of the Knock Nevis standing on its stern, you’d essentially be at the same height as the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center, inside the thing that looks like the head of a bottle opener to me.
But of course, ships aren’t built to be standing on their sterns. That’s what got me thinking… If someone had asked me which was longer; the length of the longest ship ever built or the height of the highest building ever built?, then if I had to answer impromptu, I would probably have said the ship. Why? Because building horizontally seems so much easier to me than building vertically. When building vertically, you have to fight gravity all the time, haul things up and down, and the whole thing has to be able to stand on its own.
When you give it a moment of thought though, it’s obvious a ship has to be able to maneuver, and not break during harsh seas, so ships of the length that the Knock Nevis is probably just not economically feasible. Also, there’s of course a great difference between building something that can not only move but is also self-propelled, and something that just stands still.
Nevertheless, my conclusion from this drivel is that not only is it a bad idea to compare apples and oranges, such as meters and kilograms, with each other, but it’s also a bad idea to compare meters in one dimension with meters in another dimension. Stashing apples in a row is a lot easier than stashing them on top of each other.
