Precision tortoise

The latest in our occasional series on odd measurements. Thursday's Metro featured an advertising wraparound, and the story of a tortoise called Bertie who completed a 5.48m race in 19.59 seconds. It's not the precision of the time that is odd, but the precision in the length of the race. If you're running a 5.48m race, why not round it up to 5.5m? The answer, of course is it was an 18ft long course, as an original story from the time of the record-breaking event makes clear. The source of this daft conversion is probably this press release from Guinness World Records, which includes the 5.48m measurement, although not the 18ft one, which is even more odd because it includes his speed in ft/s.

Oddly specific

This Daily Mail article about a young child abandoned by her drunken parents states that "Police found her parents 109 yards away...".

That is a very specific distance, and makes me wonder if the Portuguese police got out a measuring tape to make sure that their facts were absolutely correct. Of course, it could be that they just estimated the distance, and being European, used the metric system. So, they reckoned it was about 100 metres, which is, of course, 109.36133 yards. The Daily Mail took this conversion literally, although to be fair, they did round it down. (109 yards and one foot would have been even better, though.)