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Gummy bears as a unit of measure? The Reg Standards Soviet will not stand for this sort of silliness

Less than a fifth of a linguine, for goodness' sake – come on now

Reg Standards Bureau A new potential contribution to the world's sole source of approved units of measure has emerged – the Haribo gummy bear.

The Register's Standards Bureau has been forwarded a curious YouTube video in which the use of gelatinous ursine miniatures as a metric is featured and frankly we're not sure what to make of this.

YouTube product reviewer DC Rainmaker used two of the bears to measure the height of a portable GoPro-style camera during a video review of the product.

"You can see the size that matters here is gummy bears, so the Haribo gummy bear is the international standard of gummy bears," said DC Rainmaker, who proceeded to eat one of his measuring devices while comparing them to the device.

Reg reader James forwarded us this eye-catching moment in video review history, which, nonetheless, is not compliant with the Reg Standards Converter's unit of length, the linguine (lg). It appears that one gummy bear is around 0.16lg, with the camera being precisely 0.45 standardised (unboiled) units tall.

We note the attempt at a new, readily edible unit of distance and have given it stern consideration. Unfortunately, the sheer deliciousness of gummy bears, Haribo or otherwise, renders them unsuitable for such a role – as Mr Rainmaker so ably demonstrated.

Units of distance are a favourite for non-compliant organisations around the world, with a particularly bad outbreak occurring at the start of last year when local councils began using such nonsensical things as alligators and kangaroos as units of distance instead of linguine, brontosauruses, and double-decker buses. Or even the Osman, inducted into the Reg Standards Converter last year and named after the tallest human being ever filmed by a BBC camera.

In 2017 China launched a 13-brontosaurus aircraft carrier, a move which compares most favourably to Britain's 2,000lg Queen Elizabeth class warships. ®

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