Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · May 21 182.8 Meters xkcd.com/3248/
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"Mark 3.656!"
40 x 43,560 sq. ft. and a mule.
This joke is more than I can 182.8 centimeters.
I know many cheerfull facts about the 9.15 m distance for free kicks in football.
Always thought they should slip some of these into Star Trek Universal-Translated dialogue.
Too many times I've seen people do numerology about something being 33 feet long just because someone else was overly precise when converting "about 10 metres".
Unfathomable!
Every TTRPG ever "why would (x) be nine meters long instead of ten... oh because that's roughly ten yards" "what do you mean the diameter is 91 cm. the arrow flies 27 m?? that's so random. why on earth... oh, right."
A Munro is a Scottish mountain that stands at 3,000 feet (914.4 metres) or above. Those 914.39m mountains can fuck right off. Little baby dwarf hills we call them. And rearranging a few pebbles at the top then standing on them to take your photos doesn't count. highlandhiker.co.uk/how-tall-are...
It is a much simpler example, but this always makes me go back to one of my favourite amazing bad movies, Legend of the Liquid Sword. It has one of those awesome subtitling jobs, including a great and very literal line "Your lance is 3.3 feet long". Clearly, the ask was "Just translate literally"
You have no idea how annoyed I was when I figured out why body temperature is 98.6 F and you're not considered to have a fever until it's over 100.5 F. The fact that Fahrenheit is more granular just makes it worse.
Can you only give me masses from now on? I live over the Hudson's Bay gravity anomaly so weight is inaccurate
The scale of this comic is 10 chains to the inch
I know a translation of the bible that for example renders "144 cubits" as "65 meters," when it's clear that 144 is symbolically 12 times 12, as in the 12 tribes of Israel or the 12 apostles or any of the other things that come in twelves, and not a literal length.
The rough part is that the definition of "fathom" is historically variable. "2 English yards" (currently 1.8288 m) was only the standard adopted in places that actually used English yards, and you'll find different historical definitions in continental Europe.
There was a report about an earthquake in the Pacific that created a tsunami that by the time it reached the US West Coast was 39 inches high.
Almost everything in the world is a multiple of 3.2mm.
Leagues and fathoms were just early attempts at linguistic relativity by big sea to maintain their market’s wcon importance
Significant digits!
Jolene just has a hobby of digging new holes on the sea bed. It's hard to keep track.
Or 107.463 Smoots
i prefer to hike more than 5,280 feet
It can be entertaining reading American science reporting for this. You can often back-calculate from the imperial value given to the original metric value and units, and see how far that is from the metric value that is in the article.
This my Canadian brain at the supermarket where our packages match US ounces but displayed in ml or grams.
🤔
I still adore whoever came up with attoparsec/microfortnight - roughly 1 inch/s.
It took me a while to fathom...
But 100 Raquel Welchs is only 168 metres.
Like when they converted "old money - 240 pence to the Irish pound) to new money (decimal - 100 pence per pound), and then decades later pounds to euros (which became Irish currency). Older folk doing double mental calculations to see the price in "old money". €50 being equivalent to £39 - 7s - 7d
An anchor chain over 100 fathoms?!?? That would sink an armada!
Also, amusingly, it's more than 909.09090 links. (Same issue as noted in the mouseover.)
A long time ago, I was watching an American movie in a Paris theater and a character said, “Oh, come on. He was off by a mile!” The French subtitle duly said, “He was off by 1,609 meters!” I think the subtitlist was having fun
At one point I worked at a prominent museum, and there was a sign that had said something close to "Over 30 tons (900 kg)" because someone had evidently forgotten to do a conversion
Meters? That's for people who call it football instead of soccer.
Alternatively, their measuring device was exactly that long
That reminds me of 31.5" monitors. I was always confused why they didn't use a round number. The answer is: they did - it's 80cm.
I wrote something recently “it’s about 500 metres to the path and about a half a mile to the carpark” because ‘about 800m’ is too exact. (In Australia we know both metric and imperial and often switch between them.)
This is a pet peeve; accurately converting with high precision units that originally were obviously and brutally rounded off. "The Voyager 1 space probe is currently 25749504294736 meters from Earth".
see also “98.6 degrees Fahrenheit” sorry I think you mean 37
My first collision with this was years ago, reading a reference to a paper that reported certain wildlife behaviors at -17.8, -15, and -12.2 C.
My minivan reports temperatures in degrees C, rounded to the nearest degree F. So, it’s never e.g. 33 or 35 F.
“Furlongs/fortnight” was the unit of gas diffusion reported by one of my undergraduate chemistry-lab classmates in 1977.
It happens a lot in subtitled movies from the US. “It is no more than 3.2km in that direction”
Still don't get why Walter White has a 6000ml boiling flask
And in perhaps one of the most puerile efforts from a gov't agency attempting to polish the inside to the tiny 🍊🔔🔚 arsehole, METARs temp units have been changed from ˚C to ˚F with ˚C now in brackets ... never mind the raw data is in ˚C, gotta pander to <5% of the world's population🙄🙅♂️🤦♂️
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead
Just reread Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman. The non-SI units are like nails down a blackboard
As a Spanish speaker, I have to do this all the time when watching dubs - they typically convert any imperial measurements to metric, but when the original line approximates a distance for example, the dub converts it to an uncannily precise one, ruining the immersion
I feel less lonely. Thank you so much for this 🥺
Maybe it's just an urban legend, but I remember the Toronto Globe and Mail once had an article referring to a Texan's 38 Liter hat.
98.6F body temperature is very precise… oh, it’s 37 C 🤦♂️
"Full 9.144 metres thy father lies..."
I feel seen.
Europeans watching American youtubers
There once was a Marine quoted in a US newspaper: "When the vehicle was 229.6587926509 ft away, I opened fire, as per regulations." (Say what you will about the US Armed Forces, they ARE metric. And write dates correctly.)
car can do 0-62mph in 5.6s
This is absolutely normal when we have translated American movies here in Europe.
It should be 183 meters because you've only got 3 digits of precision.
The Opera of the Fathom.
Title text: "They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect." Alt text: https://explainxkcd.com/3248#Transcript
141.62 km/h