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I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a comm
by mrtksn 1y ago
I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
- reactordev 1y agoAmericans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
- dist-epoch 1y agoEuropeans don't even know what it means to "balance a checkbook", so they must be dumber.
- reactordev 1y agoYeah but ya’ll have estates…
- mrtksn 1y agoSure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
- reactordev 1y agoIf you were to say 100 yards, we could. That’s a football field (American football played with your… hands). Because people in the south don’t even know the imperial system… it’s bad. They say things like “Take the road there yonder and when you see the white church, turn right, go a ways until you get to the dirt road…” Anything outside of what they have with them, they don’t have a clue or can’t imagine it accurately. Small dog reference, there’s millions of Americans with a small dog so most just looked to their pooch when this came up. Same as if you were to say something like 50 cars. They would look outside to their Toyota Corolla and imagine 50 of them. It’s like talking to grown toddlers sometimes but that have full grown emotional states not under control. Not everyone is like this but a good 50-60% of Americans are. Just look for the Lululemon.
- AngryData 1y agoI would say most American's sense of feet gets fuzzy after about 30, there are very few things that are standardized that size or bigger or that they have ever personally measured out. Yards might be more useful up to maybe 200 or 300 because they have all seen football fields though. After that for most people they go to miles or minutes of travel. Some farmers might throw in a reference to an acre length that is referencing the 660 foot length of a standard acre (660 feet x 66 feet, or 1 furlong x 1 chain), which is just another way to say 1/8th of a mile.
- xandrius 1y agoI don't think it's fair to insult all US citizens because of your personal shortcomings.
- reactordev 1y agoStatistics my man, statistics. I’m not saying there aren’t smart Americans that can grok a 10kg bag, but that the vast majority can not.
- itsoktocry 1y agoI'm Canadian. I don't know what 10kg feels like until I convert it to pounds.
- thelastgallon 1y agoI think it may be fair? This guy[1] explains how surplus of corporate profits are a mirror image of household/govt debt. Which is a direct transfer of wealth from everyone to the super-super-rich (not the 1%, but the 0.1 - 0.01%) [1] The chart below shows how this works. The blue line at the top shows the “surplus” of corporations: corporate income minus expenses and net investment. We know this as corporate “free cash flow.” The red line shows combined “surplus” of other sectors: government, households, and foreign trading partners – in excess of their consumption and net investment. It’s negative, so in aggregate, they’re running a deficit. That deficit is the mirror image of the corporate surplus. This isn’t an accident. It’s just accounting (I’ve excluded a few tiny items for clarity): https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/ https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/
- dicknuckle 1y agoDo you not have personal experience with people under 40 in America? I would bet $20 over 95% of them don't know how to balance a check book.
- CivBase 1y agoI would bet $20 over 95% of them have never needed to balance a check book, and probably never will.
- SoftTalker 1y agoI know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion. At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg. All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
- zufallsheld 1y agoI guess you're in the minority here. In Germany, everything Remotely large will be measured in football fields or "Saarlands".
- martin_a 1y agoDon't forget to mention the inofficial units for fluid volumes being "Badewannen" and "Schubkarren".
- TheTxT 1y agoCan’t forget the Olympic sized swimming pools!
- thelastgallon 1y agoWhats the speed of light in football field terms?
- lloeki 1y agoApproximately 7 708 937 142 soccer fields per half time.
- rkomorn 1y agoAre we including stoppage time?
- tzs 1y agoWhen using football fields as a unit of length you should use American football fields rather than soccer fields because American football field sizes are more standardized. For American football professional, college, and high school games are all played on the same sized field, which is 100 years long. Compare to soccer, where they can even have different sized fields in the same professional league. The English Premier League wants to standardize on 105 m x 68 m but several clubs are still using other sizes: Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), and Nottingham Forest (105 x 70). For international play FIFA has a standard, but it is a range: 100-110 m x 64-70 m. There are parts of a soccer field that are precisely specified and so could be used as a standard of length. Some examples are the radius of the circle around the center mark (9.144 m), the penalty area (40.23 x 16.46 m), distance from penalty mark to goal (10.97 m), goal area (18.29 m x 5.47 m), distance between goal posts (7.32 m), and the height of the crossbar (2.44 m). The reason none of them are nice integers is that they were actually originally standardized in Imperial units. In those the aforementioned measurements are 10 yards, 44 yards x 18 yards, 12 yards, 20 yards x 6 yards, 8 yards, and 8 feet, respectively.
- thelastgallon 1y agoIt helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
- mattmaroon 1y agoHuh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills! Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
- thelastgallon 1y ago> Most of the world doesn’t have guns. No guns, but they have solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.
- mattmaroon 1y agoYou have the sort of view of America that I can only imagine comes from somebody who has never been here. I don’t know what you mean by batteries, I’m not aware of any we don’t have available. We have the second most electric vehicles after China, and nearly all new power generation being built here is renewable. I’m not sure how you managed to turn this into some anti-American rant, but at least do a better job of it, it’s very easy.
- OvervCW 1y agoWhich is strange, since one of their measurement units is literally based on a body part.
- itsoktocry 1y agoWhat's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- seec 1y agoYes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well. They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context. In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with). On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way. American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.