Once, he made the straps of a sandal out of tape measures.

NEWYORKER: Sole Mate

Using just snorkels and tape measures they produced a detailed plan of the prehistoric town which consisted of at least 15 separate buildings, courtyards, streets, two chamber tombs and at least 37 graves.

BBC: Sea gives up secrets to experts

The result, when processed through the computers of Arbonaut, a Finnish natural-resource-management company, is a three-dimensional image of the forest that can be correlated with, and calibrated by, the efforts of the chaps with the tape measures.

ECONOMIST: Forest conservation

Try to imagine the scene at the front of the lines, as already overworked TSA agents are forced to take tape measures or rulers and gauge the length and width of knives, as travelers insist their blades are shorter than 2.36 inches or that they aren't more than a half-inch wide.

CNN: Letting knives on planes would be insane

Because the 3D scanner does not compress the skin like a tape measure does, and the scanner also measures the small of the back, it produces waist measurements around 1.9cm larger than a tape measure.

BBC: Children 'have wider waists now than in 1978'

It's not like after the Gulf War, a conventional war, where you have a ticker tape parade, and sometimes the measures of effectiveness are just the absence of acts by your opponent.

CNN: General David Grange: Military strategy in Afghanistan