An Historical Post- the Sushing Scale of Fame

Celsius, Fahrenheit, Richter, Beaufort- men whose earnest endeavours to establish exact scales of measurement have ensured their enduring fame. But which of them is more or less famous than any other?

Two obstacles face those who would answer that question with rigour. One is a lack of evidence, surmountable perhaps through research. The other is more fundamental: there is no agreed measure of fame to provide the basis for an assessment. That second obstacle, which has prevented the development of the science of celebrity, is about to be swept aside as a new name is added to the list of scales of measurement- mine.

In this historic post I am announcing the Sushing scale, a radical idea that is destined to revolutionise the world of celebrity. The underpinning science of the Sushing scale is necessarily somewhat technical, and will be published in another medium following peer review. What follows is an informal introduction for the lay reader.

The Sushing scale of fame is a logarithmic decimal expression of the number of people familiar with a given celebrity, fact, idea, entity etc. (Note that the utility of the scale is not limited to denoting the fame of people.)

The Sushing scale ranges from 0 to a practical maximum of 9.857, where:

0 is the logarithm of 1, and denotes that a celebrity, idea, fact etc is known by one person only, and

9.857 is the logarithm of 7,200,000,000, and denotes a celebrity, idea, fact, etc that is familiar to every sentient member of the human race. (Assumes world population is 8bn, of which 10% is too young, too senile, or otherwise too mentally incapacitated to count.)

The unit of the scale is the Sleb (S), a phonetic contraction of ‘celeb’.  Owing to the essential difficulties associated with precise determination of fame, it is expected that broad assessments accurate only to two figures will be the norm. That being so, the deci-Sleb (dS) will be a convenient notation, with values running from 0 to 97 being a convenient and compact way to encompass the spectrum of celebrity.

The following examples illustrate the application of the Sushing scale: