What is taller than the Empire State Building and shorter than the Burj Khalifa?

As many know, our stats page shows you your collection up against various monuments. Our new stats system does this too, but we have a problem!

At present our top sizes are the Empire State Building and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. The former is 1,250 feet high (or 1,454 to tip?). The latter is 2,717 / 2,722 feet high.

The gap between those measurements is bad; we need some things in between the two sizes. Ideally, we would NOT use buildings. Buildings are boring and we have enough of them. So here's your chance—what's in between these two heights but not a building?

Mountains? Waterfalls? Average flying height of the African Swallow?

Bonus points for literary-related items, obviously.

>2 conceptDawg:

Darn it all.

I realize the swallow thing was a joke, and I get the reference. But. It turns out swallows prefer relatively low altitudes for migrating, so it's not a terrible option in a hard range. (Otherwise, maybe swap out a building elsewhere in a range where you have more interesting options?)

No, I'm thinking there might be something like that. A bird. Maximum flying height for drones? Highest an arrow has ever flown?

(Drat, highest arrow was 930 feet.)

CN Tower is 1,815 feet tall.

Edit: Whoops, missed that you DON'T want buildings. Gocta Falls is 2,530 feet? Although that's less centered in the middle of the gap.

Yosemite falls at 2,425 ft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_waterfalls_by_height

There’s the hill in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, which was less than 2000ft at the beginning of the book but not at the end… (but that’s much better known as a film than a novel)

>7 davidgn:

That's good. Closer to the lower end would be better, but I'd take that if we can't find one.

>8 thorold: A literary reference would be good.

Mount Lofty in South Australia is not so very lofty - it's a mere 2,385 feet, which amuses me.

Biblical reference: Mount Tabor in lower Galilee is 1886 feet.

Mount Carmel is 1,724 feet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Carmel

Are you open to depth? Crater Lake, the deepest lake in the US, is 1,949ft deep

The Reichenbach Falls are too small (250m), and the Brocken is far too high (1141m).

What about the highest mountain in Belgium — Signal de Botrange at 694m, 2277 ft? Not very literary, but quirky.
Snaefell on the Isle of Man is 2036ft, but difficult to sell as something book-related, unless you are a fan of Hall Caine.

Maximum height of lava fountains from (x) volcano? (Aetna would be too high, Kilauea would be about right.) Height at which a human falling in Earth atmosphere must start to hit terminal velocity? Optimum height for detonation of a nuclear bomb?

....I seem to be feeling morbid today

Korvatunturi fell, the Finnish home of Father Christmas, 1954 ft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korvatunturi

rats, all the pyramids are way too short.

Gocta Cataracts/Falls in Peru at 2530 ft/770m

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is 2,430 ft/740 m.

Dang, the Tower of Art is only 800 ft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseen_University#Tower_of_Art

Thinking about this has made me really want a graph showing my library in relation to literary-related things. We could have:

Treebeard--14 ft
Glumdalclitch--40 ft
The Wall--700 ft
Reichenbach Falls--820 ft
Cori Celesti--10 miles

>20 amanda4242: We have that but there are other, non-literary, things thrown in. Certainly we could exchange some of those with literary versions.

Our current list:
garden gnome: 1.08 ft
tennis net: 3.00 ft
hobbit: 3.50 ft
pony: 4.80 ft
Emperor Napoleon: 5.17 ft
ostrich: 7.50 ft
Nike of Samothrace: 10.75 ft
double-decker bus: 14.30 ft
Michaelangelo's David: 17.00 ft
giraffe: 18.00 ft
Stonehenge: 25.00 ft
Cleopatra's Needle: 68.00 ft
Sphinx: 75.00 ft
Statue of Liberty: 151.00 ft
Niagara Falls: 167.00 ft
Taj Mahal: 239.00 ft
Big Ben: 315.90 ft
Great Pyramid: 450.00 ft
Washington Monument: 555.50 ft
St. Louis Arch: 630.50 ft
Eiffel Tower: 1,063.00 ft
Empire State Building: 1,250.00 ft
Burj Khalifa: 2,716.00 ft

>21 conceptDawg:

Certainly we could exchange some of those with literary versions.

Please don't go too far afield. Of the five items mentioned in >20 amanda4242:, I recognize only one.

conceptDawg (#21):

I very much doubt the precision of most of those values you quote.

>23 lorax: Doubt away. Those aren't my numbers. Heh.
More to the point, if you find errors in the numbers let us know. These things are easily corrected.

Except Gnomes. Those are less easily corrected. They have attitudes.
Especially Shmebulock.

Whose numbers are they? I want to go yell at anyone who thinks the Great Pyramid is exactly 450 feet to within a tenth of an inch. (450, I'd believe, maybe. 450.00 not in a million years.)

>22 lilithcat: Which one did you recognize?

And for anyone who's wondering where the list in >20 amanda4242: comes from:

Treebeard--The Lord of the Rings
Glumdalclitch--Gulliver's Travels
The Wall--A Song of Ice and Fire
Reichenbach Falls--Real place famously used in a Sherlock Holmes story
Cori Celesti--Discworld

>26 amanda4242:

Reichenbach Falls.

It's been a million years (well, okay, decades) since I read Lord of the Rings and Gulliver's Travels. I don't know the other two at all.

Yes, what is this Song of Fire and Ice you speak of? Sounds like it would make a passable miniseries.

>28 MrAndrew: I think it's a short story by George Martin, the Beatles producer.

A Song of Ice and Fire is the name of the series that starts with the book A Game of Thrones, for which I can't find the right touchstone. The series that started the TV show.

>30 al.vick:

A Game of Thrones?

The Leaning Tower of Pisa (183.27 feet on one side, 185.93 on the other) may be a building, but it has the advantage of resembling some of my tottering book piles.

>31 lilithcat: If you want to know about the series of books or the TV series, google it.

>6 coprime:

As I understand it, the CN Tower is no longer considered a building, so technically you're in luck.

>34 cpg: Today I learned the difference between a building and a tower. Thank you!

1771.65 feet : Gargantua (Rabelais)
i.e :
Notre Dame de Paris : 90m (295.276 f)
Gargantua = 6 * NDdP
so : 6*295.276 = 1771.65



Real cover from a real book :


But sometimes, Gargantua is a dwarf:

>32 Marissa_Doyle:

For small stacks of books, we could use the vertical deviation of 3.9 meters (12 ft 10 in) from the vertical of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa

The Ever Given is 1312 ft (the longest ship on Wikipedia is an oil tanker at 1,504).

The Ever Given is 1312 ft

Snrk. That's a good one.

>39 melannen: That could be an interesting take - the length of shelf space you need. (Ducks - cue arguments over miles or kilometres or whatever unit of distance you use.)

I don't think anyone could do much with a book near the bottom of a stack the height of a skyscraper (or climb to one near the top), but the distance you have to walk to get to where it's shelved...

I wish I could contribute to this discussion, but my mind does not work in feet.

OK, have you folks gone nuts?

>42 Petroglyph: For what it's worth, a meter is ~39 inches, which is 3 feet, 3 inches. So you can estimate 1 meter ~ 3.2 feet. Have fun.

>39 melannen: >41 Maddz: if the door opens on ship length, there are some fictional starships and space vessels that could be recognisable enough to use. The following site has several comparison images: https://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/comparison/index.html
It deals in metric, so the desired range 1 250 ft to 2 717 ft translates into 381 m to 828 m, with 450 m plum in the middle >42 Petroglyph: if that's any help for your visualisation. Picard's USS Enterprise-D clocks in at 642 m (2 106 ft), as an easy example of one from sci-fi that an average user could know.

>43 krazy4katz:
I know the conversion rate, and I can apply it if I want to. It's just that talking about measurements in feet requires constant conversions in my head, and that is an effort I am not willing to make.

>44 Nevov: Yeah, I remembered Ever Given after looking up a bunch of spaceships (And rockets!) I think Ever Given would be funnier stood on its end in a lineup than the Enterprise though. ;P

This is really surprisingly hard once you remove buildings - "about 1/2 to 3/4 of a kilometer" (which is what I've been using as my benchmark to try to think of things) is a scale that's a little bit too big for living things and a little bit too small for record-holding landscape features.

>45 Petroglyph: I agree with you. Although having spent my entire life in the US, and therefore used to miles, feet and inches, I am a scientist and find the metric system so much more sane.

2000 feet is both the building height limit in the US and the minimum airplane flying height over populated areas in the US, both set by the FAA

The Rock of Gibraltar is 426 m (or 1,398 ft in barbarian units) at its peak. Perhaps too close to the Empire State Building to be useful here.

barbarian units. The height of Fafhrd , perhaps.

You would think that the maximum building height would be set a little lower than the minimum flying height, surely. It's just asking for trouble.

>25 lorax: Whose numbers are they? I want to go yell at anyone who thinks the Great Pyramid is exactly 450 feet to within a tenth of an inch. (450, I'd believe, maybe. 450.00 not in a million years.)

Unfortunately, they can no longer be climbed. So we will never know.

>51 timspalding: Wikipedia has it as 454', (or 5442 pyramid inches), but that's current height from the original base, not counting the missing capstone (It was originally exactly 280 royal cubits). I think people do trigonometry with the shadow even if they can't climb it. ;)

Any more precision than a handspan or so doesn't really seem to make sense since then you have to ask if, like, there is any windblown sand on top this week.

p.s.: Are you planning to close the gap between the St. Louis Arch and the Eiffel Tower? That's also pretty big compared to the others.

And it's not, of course, only the pyramid that has that ridiculous level of precision. Niagara Falls' height, at the quoted precision, will depend on the water levels that day. The double-decker bus will depend on the tire pressure, and how many people are on board. Etc.

The tales I tell, occasionally ;)

Are you planning to close the gap between the St. Louis Arch and the Eiffel Tower?

LibraryThing Towers. Has a ring to it!

>45 Petroglyph:

Excessive exposure to Americans has left me able to think in feet when it comes to people’s heights and things of similar magnitude. Funnily enough it doesn’t extrapolate outside that range; if you tell me a man is 6’ tall I know immediately what that means, but if you tell me a mountain is 6000’ I have to convert it to meters before it means anything to me.

Here's another fun one. I need a list of terms from very very popular to very very obscure. This is to show users how obscure their books are as compared to other members.

My current list for discussion is:

1. Top 100
2. Blockbusters (top 1,000 books)
3. Popular (top 25k)
4. High mid-list (top 250k)
5. Low mid-list (top 1m)
6. Obscure (1-2.5m)
7. Virtually unknown (2.5m+)

>57 timspalding: Arcane or esoteric for the more obscure.

>58 amanda4242:
+1

Okay, so…

1. Top 100
2. Blockbusters (top 1,000 books)
3. Popular (top 25k)
4. High mid-list (top 250k)
5. Low mid-list (top 1m)
6. Esoteric (1-2.5m)
7. Obscure (2.5m+)

?

>60 timspalding:

I’d thought Esoteric more uncommon than merely Obscure.

Heh. Everyone with foreign-language books (excluding the largest languages) will be told that all those books are obscure or arcane.

I suggest "common as muck" for the top 100.

and "Kardashian" for popular (*ducks*).

recherché for low mid-list

Scarce for high mid-list

for Blockbusters, universal or prosaic.

There might be space for "niche" somewhere on the spectrum.

There’s a fine line somewhere between “niche” and “candidate for data-correction” — it’s all a matter of context.

>61 AndreasJ: I’d thought Esoteric more uncommon than merely Obscure.

My thinking as well.

>62 anglemark: This is a good point. Something similar happens with recommendations where for one bestseller in a foreign language you just get recommended all the other bestsellers from around the same time. I don't think it can really be fixed without having larger data sets in those languages though.