THE MEASURED RESPONSE

It seems awfully strange that we still use horsepower as the standard measure for an engine's pulling power. You get these motorbikes that are, like, 900 horsepower or something. When you get into jet aeroplanes you're talking in the tens of thousands of horsepower. I think like most city slickers, I have no real concept of what one horse's power might be, let alone hundreds.

Surely there's some point where this scale becomes irrelevant. You don't get astronomers telling me the distance to the sun in footsteps, do you? They're using meters , kilometres, light years. They're not telling us it's 390,000,451,067,003,001 average horse lengths to the sun, are they?

And yet, your new Saab motor car comes out and it's horsepower this and horsepower that, always with the horsepower. I have no idea what 900 horsepower even means. Am I supposed to imagine 900 horses running along? Is that the sales pitch?

You see this fighter plane? That's 470,000 horsepower you're looking at, flying up there in the sky. Yup, imagine 470,000 horses trotting along, Pegasus-style, in the sky - they're all there, in that jet plane. Whoosh. And they're gone.