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> an area nearly as large as Kuwait. Do journalists all have some tool where they enter the number of acres something is, and it tells them the state or countr
by Alex3917 5y ago
> an area nearly as large as Kuwait.
Do journalists all have some tool where they enter the number of acres something is, and it tells them the state or country that's the closest in size?
- whycombagator 5y agoYes it’s called google
- layoutIfNeeded 5y agoQuick, make a SaaS of this!
- ragebol 5y agoAs sibling comment of adriaN, there is https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres
- adrianN 5y agohttps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+acres About 0.2 Wales or 1.3 Rhode Islands
- pradn 5y agoAmericans might be more familiar with Kuwait compared to other countries for the nefarious reason of having fought a war to defend its oil.
- mc32 5y agoYou know, in retrospect maybe we should have let Saddam just do whatever the F* he wanted to do over there as long as he didn’t monopolize and drive up the price of oil all at once, but I don’t think the decision to drive him out was a bad one. The bad decision over there was doing it a second time for made up reasons.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoAlmost. The tool randomizes its output by country, state, city, tennis courts, football fields and various animals. This ensures that you never can compare anything.
- rtkwe 5y agoMaybe but there's also just lists like this. It's the most basic fact to find I should hope any journalist wouldn't need a special tool to get that kind of fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
- TomSwirly 5y agoThe point is that even for educated people, comparing something to the area of Kuwait is obscure and unhelpful.
- jfengel 5y agoWikipedia also has a set of "Orders of magnitude [length, power, area, etc]" articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(area) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(area) It only has a few examples for each order of magnitude, so in this case we'd get just "between Jamaica and Belgium". Still, I find these pages useful for getting a general idea of what something means, and as fodder for further researching evocative comparisons.