The gram, 1/1000 of a kilogram, was provisionally defined in 1795 as the mass of one cubic centimetre of water at the melting point of ice. The final kilogram, manufactured as a prototype in 1799, and from which the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK) was derived in 1875, had a mass equal to the mass of 1 dm3 of water under atmospheric pressure and at the temperature of its maximum density, which is approximately 4 °C.
When I first contemplated this diary, the pResident by some accounts had told 2300 lies during his time in office. When I later updated the diary, but didn’t dare publish it, the number was in the 6000s and the daily rate of lies was increasing. Now that the Trump pResidency is mercifully over, Glen Kessler at the Washington Post has provided a fact check lie total for the four years of the Trump pResidency and the final number is a whopping 30,573 www.washingtonpost.com/….
An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
That amounts to an average of 21 lies per day (rounded up). Like the Scaramouche and the kilogram, that lies/day average needs to used going forward as some sort of standard of measurement.
Keeping accurate count of President Trump’s lies and misstatements of fact is a Sisyphean task en.oxforddictionaries.com/... . Given the sheer frequency with which he misrepresented reality — and the huge range of serious and banal topics he is willing to lie about, keeping an accurate count of the lies over time has proven difficult. According to the Washington Post, the number at the end of his first year in office is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2140 (+/- a few covfefes) but over the next 3 years it ballooned www.washingtonpost.com/... www.washingtonpost.com/…
The staggering quantity and range of the lies requires some new way to measure and track them. I need some help with that. An new unit of measurement — akin to the Smoot.
2018 marked the 60th anniversary of the ‘Smoot’ as a unit of linear measurement en.wikipedia.org/.… and that provided me with inspiration for a new unit for quantifying Trump’s lack of truthiness. However it was necessary to wait for the end of his presidency to make an accurate determination of the value of a djt.
Smoots
For those of you who have never crossed the Harvard/MIT Bridge in Boston en.wikipedia.org/..., a Smoot is equivalent to the height of one Oliver R. Smoot, when he was an MIT freshman in 1958. Smoot was a Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity pledge whose 67 inch long body was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Mass. Ave bridge over the Charles River by repeatedly laying him down from one end of the bridge to the other (the bridge is 364.4 Smoots long +/- 1 ear).
The Smoot is equal to 1.7018m and has become a recognized unit of alternative measurement — Smoots can be used in such formats as Google Earth (honest, I am not making that up).
Oliver Smoot graduated from MIT with the class of 1962, earned a law degree at Georgetown and by some mysterious quirk of fate, (and I am not making this up either) Smoot then became chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI, 2001–02) and later, the president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, 2003–04), the national bodies tasked with maintaining standards of measurement.
The post-Trump world is now in need of another new universal unit of measurement — one that quantifies falsehood — which I propose be called a djt — which can now be accurately quantified and added to this list.
A |
ampere |
electric current |
K |
kelvin |
temperature |
s |
second |
time |
m |
metre |
length |
kg |
kilogram |
mass |
cd |
candela |
luminous intensity |
mol |
mole |
amount of substance |
ci curie radioactivity of a substance,
djt trump lie density — lies/day
We need a new scale to measure this. A whole new set of units and a vernacular vocabulary. Forget about Pinocchio's or Pants on Fire, we’re eventually going to measure lies (or maybe just political lies) in DJTs — Donald J Trumps at a standard rate of 20.9260780287 lies per day.
If scientists had sacred objects, the Kilogram would be one of them: a single, closely guarded 137-year-old cylinder of metal, kept in a vault outside of Paris. It is the standard by which a kilogram of mass everywhere in the universe is calibrated.
Back in 2019 International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) reviewed four basic units of measure, including the crucial kilogram. Their recommendations were put before the General Conference on Weights and Measures in November 2018, and took effect in May 2019.www.popularmechanics.com/…
That review concerned a potential redefinition of the ampere (a unit of electricity), the kelvin (temperature), the mole (measurement of atoms and or molecules) and the kilogram. The four units starting in 2019, were defined by "relationships to fundamental constants, rather than abstract or arbitrary definitions" according to Nature. My recommendation regarding the DJT as a unit for measuring lies may seem like it goes against this philosophical canon, but Trump’s relationship with the truth is bordering on a fundamental constant.
While a curie is a measure of the radioactivity of a substance, the amount of energy that a radioactive source deposits in living tissue is measured in rems or millirems. www.nrc.gov/… Lies are sort of like radiation — we absorb them and they cause cumulative damage. (Think about all the times you’ve looked at the cover of the National Enquirer while waiting in a supermarket check out line)
A person is likely to accumulate 1 mrem from any one of the following activities:
- 3 days of living in Atlanta
- 2 days of living in Denver
- 1 year of watching television (on average)
- 1 year of wearing a watch with a luminous dial
- 1 coast-to-coast airline flight
- 1 year living next door to a normally operating nuclear power plant
I propose djts as the the corresponding average lie density injected into the universe of public discourse per day by Donald John Trump over the 4 year course of his presidency. We need a scale for this, but I suggest that a single djt might be accumulated by a person listening to 2 minutes of Fox News or by watching the president’s lips move for 1 minute.
In his first year, the President confabulated an alternate fact universe where he freely spewed a stream of lies misstatements deceptions and whole cloth fabrications at an average rate of nearly 6 per day. The least racist person has a good relationship with Kim Jong Un, has sold ‘invisible’ F-52 fighter jets to Norway (or maybe in a great deal, he traded them to Nambia for Covfefe), who attracted the largest inauguration crowd ever, whose tax bill ‘isn’t good’ for him, who uncovered massive evidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election — because he is after all, ‘like a smart guy’ and according to him, everyone knows there was no collusion and that the Access Hollywood tape was only locker room talk. The guy who appeared more qualified to occupy a padded room in a dementia ward rather than the Oval Office thought that Hillary Clinton should be locked up.
Tagging "the Russia thing" a "made-up story" has overwhelmingly earned the Liar in Chief the winner of PolitiFact’s reader competition for most significant falsehood of 2017. www.politifact.com/... That lie was so good that it was also the falsehood selected by PolitiFact for Lie of the Year in 2016. For the second year running, it beat out some real steamers from his political competitors — mental giants like Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, who opined that ’ nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care’
What could we do to commemorate that president whose life is a golden spray tan tapestry of lies,— lies woven about the whole gamut of reality from the number of stories in Trump tower to obstruction of justice to the perpetrators height and weight, than to commemorate his most noted accomplishment with a new unit of measure
There are studies that indicate the average man thinks about sex 19 times per day. www.theatlantic.com/… That is a fuzzy number and might be more accurately stated with some +/- range like radiocarbon determinations, but Its no small accomplishment that Trump managed on average to lie more often than than the average man thought about sex. There were bigger numbers. People said they thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and (until about 5pm) coffee. Watching TV, checking email and other forms of media use also won out over sex for the entire day. In fact, sex only became a predominant thought towards the end of the day (around midnight), and even then it was firmly in second place, behind sleep.
For Trump it was and always will be lies and that is how he might best be remembered in history.