4 ms·
As a big proponent of the metric system, acre feet are pretty reasonable. An acre is a decent sized plot of land for a house in the ~dense country, you can easi
by kadoban 2y ago
As a big proponent of the metric system, acre feet are pretty reasonable. An acre is a decent sized plot of land for a house in the ~dense country, you can easily picture it. Flood that to a foot and you have an acre foot.
A single m^3 is fairly easy to visualize, but once you get to higher amounts it's pretty meaningless.
- runarberg 2y agoI think you have to be pretty used to visualize volume before it becomes easy. I think having the unit based on a cube still helps though, especially since you can pick a different sized base cube based on the scale (mm³, cm³, deciliter, liter, m³, km³, etc.), having the base unit be this extremely low, and wide rectangular cuboid only aids in your visualization in a very specific context, namely how how many foots you are flooding your acre sized fields with water.
- opium_tea 2y agoYeah excellent point. When presenting numbers for reading/interpretation then talking in terms of cubes with a certain side length has to be the easiest to interpret. Its important to be specific about the units and not say "5 metres cubed" because that will just lead to confusion with m^3 (already confusing to be fair!). An alternative is using "known" points of reference like Olympic swimming pools, the Sistine Chapel etc (similar to "an area the size of Belgium"). But that risks getting absurd.