three cubic acres

[Nils Lid Hjort]

There have been various contributions recently concerning the 
architecture of Scrooge's bin. Some excerpts are 
<<Of course, 3 cubic acres is not a real measure, but if it were, then 
  the Bin should be about 3 times as big: 360 feet.>>
<<I don't understand that calculation, Frank, but it may be 
  because I am a...>>
<<non-mathematicians ready to argue that a cubic acre is the volume of a 
  cube whose side has a surface of one acre. >>
<<1 acre = 4047 m2, hence the hight of three acres must be the square root 
  of 3 times 4047 m2 if we assume the bin to be a true cube. This gives 
  us 110 meters--certainly a high building--more than 30 floors or so.>>

I've always liked this flamboyant noncongruent logicdefying
Goedelian turn of phrase of Barks to describe the volume content 
of Scrooge's money bin. It also translates well into various Scandinavian 
languages, as "tre kubikkmål" and the like. In addition to having 
the right roll-off-the-tongue magical pseudorealism quality to it, 
it carries with it a perhaps involuntary trace of the extraterrestial 
whereabouts of Duckburg. It indicates that the Ducks live in a 
six-dimensional universe (since a cubed area by necessity is in 
a linearly affine relation to Lebesgue measure on the completed 
by subsets of nullsets sigma-algebra of the Borel sets of a measurable 
subset of the Euclidean six-dimensional space). It is from this magical 
universe, which partly exists inside us, partly outside and partly 
between us, that we somehow are able to retrieve reports in two- and 
three-dimensional forms, from which we have to learn, invent, guess, 
understand, expand and dream, about Duckburg and its inhabitants, 
and about ourselves. 

Nils Lid Hjort