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There's a reason things like football fields are commonly used as measurements in science communication: it actually helps the average person to get a sense of
by Denvercoder9 5y ago
There's a reason things like football fields are commonly used as measurements in science communication: it actually helps the average person to get a sense of scale.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- spaetzleesser 5y agoBut it also makes it impossible to compare things. A lot of these articles switch from tennis court to football field to school bus to width of a hair. I would be ok if they wrote something like “100m long which is about the size of a football field”. But I really hate that they omit the numbers. I have no idea how many tennis courts fit into an football field and how that translates to school buses. And I bet most people don’t know either. But I know that 30 meters fits 3.3 times into 100 meters. This kind of writing manipulates people and keeps them dumb. The same happens in politics. They often omit that when they write that something costs 100 billion that this is actually over 20 years. Another time they bring up a number that’s over 5 years 1 year. Whatever is more convenient for the story. All this writing seems designed not to educate and inform but to keep people dumb and to appeal to the emotions the author wants to effect.
- andrepd 5y agoDoes it make a difference if it's 100m or 110m or 90m?? For a general audience? Obviously it does not, the point is to convey the scale/order of magnitude. Is it about the size of a person? An elephant? A bus? A football pitch? That's what is being communicated here.