10 ms·
I like how the measurement unit seems to be either small cars or school busses.
by throwaway4good 4y ago
I like how the measurement unit seems to be either small cars or school busses.
- anigbrowl 4y agoAmerican no abstract good
- jffry 4y agoI could tell you the Curiosity rover is 2.9m × 2.7m × 2.2m and 899kg, but it's far more immediately evocative to say it's about the size and mass of a typical sedan.
- meepmorp 4y agoApparently, America is the only country on earth where mass media describes things in familiar terms to make them readily intelligible to a wide audience.
- timeon 4y agoEven if typical sedan is something that is quite common I still prefer actual measurements so I can reference it to something that I am personally more familiar with. I know that one can fit typical sedan inside 2.5m x 5m parallel parking spot but so does SUV and Fiat Punto.
- anigbrowl 4y agoTo you, perhaps. I really like getting the dimensional information; my dig was at the way news media preemptively goes for the lowest common denominator every time, and frequently omits the accurate information altogether. I think this contributes to innumeracy.
- tedunangst 4y agoIt incorporates error bars. A mini is a small car, but maybe a mustang is a small car, too.
- mynameishere 4y ago"The US announced today that it destroyed a balloon the size of a traditional Islamic wedding feast."
- ddoolin 4y agoSomething they should be very familiar with the size of, at this point.
- Dalewyn 4y ago"Japan announced today that it sighted a UFO five Tokyo Domes large."
- nemo44x 4y agoDark but rather brilliant.
- amelius 4y ago"The US announced today that it destroyed a balloon the size of Putin's oval meeting table"
- jacooper 4y ago*Gulf feast, there isn't really a fixed feast in islam
- yosito 4y agoAmericans will measure with anything except the metric system.
- backtoyoujim 4y agothe legalized cannabis industry is doing all it can, man.
- arbuge 4y agoFor sure... https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36593/20220314/asteroid-half-size-giraffe-hits-iceland-2-hours-astronomers-spotted.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36593/20220314/asteroi...
- Koshkin 4y ago1/40,000,000 of the Earth’s circumference does not make sense to me, but the foot does. (As does the school bus.)
- doodlebugging 4y agoHow many Olympic-sized swimming pools is that?
- timeon 4y agoFor better picture, Olympic-sized swimming pool is 50 meters long.
- doodlebugging 4y agoThanks. It's also half as wide as it is long and 2 meters deep. That still is not a useful comparison if the audience has never seen one. It's a comparison without a useful reference. I always thought it funny and nearly worthless for an author or announcer to describe the volume of something in terms of Olympic swimming pools as if everyone listening or reading had a useful frame of reference in that comparison.
- tharkun__ 4y agoCan you convert this to libraries of congress for me please?
- weeblewobble 4y agoPeople who’ve never seen one still understand that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is “quite big”. Which is the general impression people are trying to get across when they use that phrase. People in the Olympics are the best athletes in the world. And I bet world class athletes need a big pool to compete in. That gives you a pretty decent sense of the scale of an Olympic sized swimming pool without ever having seen one.
- doodlebugging 4y agoI agree that most people will decide that Olympic sized pools must be big but it doesn't give a layman any clue to just how large a volume they contain in some contexts where you find the comparison used. For example, I made a comment about a similar comparison in a post here on HN a while ago because their example was simply ridiculous [0]. The author in that article referenced the volume of a large body of water as being "about 240 billion Olympic sized pools". I believe that they could've used almost anything else that most people would identify as being very large as a reference but instead they chose a large swimming pool. If an item is used as a reference the scale of the reference and the object should be chosen such that the reader could quickly understand that while one may be big, the other is bigger by some easily pictured amount. [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29710752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29710752
- Koshkin 4y agoThese are perfectly good measurement units. (Also, football field.)
- iancmceachern 4y agoAlso, fruit
- iancmceachern 4y agoDownvoted because someone doesn't think that fruit is commonly used as a definition of size? We often say things are the size of a grape, or an apple, or a grapefruit. Weird thing to downvote folks
- ncr100 4y ago/s If that unit causes you any pain, @throwaway4good, here is a translator perhaps to more native units: https://www.converttobananas.com/ https://www.converttobananas.com/ 1 car == about 26 bananas. Improvement?