BOULDER, CO — In an attempt to make American engineering more competitive by standardizing measurements used in official publications, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today announced that the “reference school bus” held under vacuum at a climate-controlled warehouse in Boulder, Colorado is to be retired, and will no longer be used to determine the official American unit of length.
Beginning on January 1st, 2023, a school bus length will be defined mathematically, as the distance traveled by the speed of light in a vacuum in precisely 1/3,200,000th the blink of an eye. This is one million times greater than the width of a human hair, or approximately 1/12th the length of a football field. The new definition will make it easier for American scientists and science educators to collaborate productively.
As part of the change, the “height of an average human male” will further be fixed at 1/5th of one school bus. A press release confirmed this will permit the official unit of volume, Olympic swimming pools, to be specified as exactly the space bounded by a rectangular prism that is 5 school busses laid end to end by 3 school busses laid end to end, filled to a depth of one average human male.
Officials were quick to stress that the change does not impact American progress towards so-called “metrification,” which started in the 1970s. Timelines published by the agency indicate the United States is still on track to complete adoption of the metric system by the time Neil Armstrong’s moon landing is as old to your children as the Gettysburg Address is to people living today.
The school bus is the most recent unit of measure to be pegged to a physical constant, after 2015’s formal definition of “the energy it would take to run a house for a year!” standardized the American unit of work. Citing agency statisticians, an NIST spokesman suggested that a new, more rigorous calculation of the Hiroshima could come next, possibly as soon as 2024.
The NIST currently defines the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima as the energy released by dropping 36,000 blue whales from the top of the Burj Khalifa.