CBC has a piece about a woman in Maine who found a python in her washing machine when she was removing clothes from it. She’s a bit paranoid about doing laundry now. I’m still a bit curious as to how exactly the snake managed to get there. I’m even more curious about the following bit:
Maine Animal Damage Control operator Richard Burton reached into the machine and pulled and pulled – all 2432 centimetres of a reticulated python.
I might also be paranoid if I found a 81′ snake in my washing machine. Never mind how it got there. How does it fit in there? How big is the washing machine?
Any ideas as to what number the CBC really meant to use?
Sydney
Alan Schmierer
2432 mm?
That sounds like a more plausible length. But since when do we measure big snakes in mm? I suspect, too, that this is one of those cases where they used a number that suggests more precision than is warranted, i.e., I bet they started with an AP story that gave the snake’s length in feet, give or take half a foot, and then a CBC writer took that number, multiplied it by something or other on a calculator to convert it to the metric system, and then just took the result as is, giving the impression that the number is accurate to within a mm. Or cm.