[mrtksn]

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.

[zufallsheld]

I guess you're in the minority here. In Germany, everything Remotely large will be measured in football fields or "Saarlands".

[jve]

I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.

Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.

But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.

Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.

[martin_a]

Don't forget to mention the inofficial units for fluid volumes being "Badewannen" and "Schubkarren".

[TheTxT]

Can’t forget the Olympic sized swimming pools!

[thelastgallon]

Whats the speed of light in football field terms?

[lloeki]

Approximately 7 708 937 142 soccer fields per half time.

[tzs]

When 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.

[lloeki]

I don't know the first thing about football, only that it has the words "foot" and "ball", none of which apply to the American variant who is played with hands and a (geometric) lemon[1] :p

I figured FIFA/UEFA who both standardised on 105m, sensibly factored ±5m to account for Heisenberg uncertainty when approaching relativistic speeds. This is very well depicted - complete with curvature of space, train paradox, spooky action at a distance, time dilation, and other relativistic oddities - in a documentary I watched when I was young; if only I could recall the original name...

EDIT: I think it was キャプテン翼.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(geometry)

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke5AZhJCPSg

[rkomorn]

Are we including stoppage time?

[itsoktocry]

What's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.

[seec]

Yes 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.

[OvervCW]

Which is strange, since one of their measurement units is literally based on a body part.

[reactordev]

Americans 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…

[xandrius]

I don't think it's fair to insult all US citizens because of your personal shortcomings.

[thelastgallon]

I 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/

[reactordev]

Statistics 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]

I'm Canadian. I don't know what 10kg feels like until I convert it to pounds.

[dicknuckle]

Do 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.

[pennomi]

95% of them can’t turn a block of flint into a spearhead either. Without skills like these, how will the younger generation hunt mammoths?

[SoftTalker]

Who still uses a checkbook?

And with your bank balance instantly available on the computer in your pocket, and transactions posted in near-real-time, why would you need to worry about balancing it?

[CivBase]

I would bet $20 over 95% of them have never needed to balance a check book, and probably never will.

[itsoktocry]

Why are you going on about "balancing a check book?"

I'm in my 40s. Never did it, never going to.

[mrguyorama]

No, Americans are numerically illiterate.

Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use

They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"

There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.

[xandrius]

Sorry for the ignorance, what what does "balancing a check book" mean? Is that an euphemism or an actual activity?

I can of course look up but interested in continuing the conversation.

[mrguyorama]

"Balancing the check book" refers to the process of running your own log of check transactions using something like https://cdn.wallethub.com/wallethub/images/posts/14483/check... and ensuring that it matches the occasional official balance statement from your bank occasionally.

Don't want to make assumptions about what you know so forgive any overexplanation...

It is about ensuring that you manage your account balance, so as to not write checks that your account balance cannot actually fulfill. Writing a check that you can't actually pay because your checking account is too low is called "Bouncing" a check, and generally costs you money at your bank and the place that you wrote the check, and will often result in those places being less likely to accept a check from you.

A secondary purpose was to ensure that your bank did not pay out a check that you have no record of writing. The check system has almost no protection, so anyone who had ever gotten a check from you could theoretically attempt to create fraudulent and forged checks against your account. You would check your record against the banks to check for this.

You would do this constantly, as in writing down every check you write, and once a month or so, actually doing the math, comparing your record of checks against the bank's record of checks.

I would also consider it a euphemism for "Financial literacy" in plenty of people's heads.

It is without a doubt the simplest possible mathematical task you can have as an adult. It is literally addition and subtraction, and logging every check. Every single American who attends public school until 4th grade has been taught the required knowledge for this task: Addition, subtraction, and the concept of negative numbers.

People say "Schools should teach balancing a check book" as some sort of cry that they think schools should focus on "practical" skills rather than, say, persuasive essay writing or reading literature or learning art.

Those people are demonstrating that they are too stupid to even understand what they have been taught. These same people will sit in math class and argue about how they "will never use this", in reference to things like calculating interest. They will often also say "Schools don't teach critical thinking", openly and proudly ignorant of the hilarity of someone who can't follow very basic instructions that anyone can find in five seconds and often come with the checkbook complaining about not being taught how to think.

Similarly, Americans will complain that school didn't teach them how to "do their taxes", which is hilarious, because for 95% of Americans, your federal taxes are a couple of pages and about 14 lines of numbers you have to fill in, most of them are numbers you copy from another piece of paper, and the rest have literal worksheets to follow.

Most people joke about how VCRs used to constantly have the "12:00" blinking clock because nobody would set them because it's "too hard". As a literal child who fixed this exact issue, it was a single page of instructions, and they were trivial. But for the majority of Americans who like to speak up, it seems like they are totally incapable of following even the most basic of instruction.

Frankly, stupidity is not a moral failing. Nobody chose to be born stupid. But ignorance, especially fixable ignorance, IS. America has a serious problem of people being openly ignorant and thinking their ignorance should be anything other than an opportunity to improve. I think the biggest problem in the USA is how much respect and attention people who demonstrably refuse to learn and are ignorant of pretty much everything get. That's why, for example, you have people insisting that rail transport is impossible in the US because it's too big, despite the fact that we literally built a cross country rail network using public funds when the country was dramatically less populated than now, or how government inherently mismanages healthcare despite about 100 examples of government mismanagement producing better outcomes than we get.

[xandrius]

Cool, thanks for the overexplanation.

I thought checks were things of the 80s or something, in other parts of the world you mostly either have the money or not, so the act of balancing checks wouldn't exist.

Interesting. Is it still that common to use checks as opposed to just a debit card?

[reactordev]

This is about as thorough as it can be. Thank you. I was definitely referring to financial literacy. Man, Americans…

[mrtksn]

Sure 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.

[AngryData]

I 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.

[reactordev]

If 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.

[SoftTalker]

I 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?

[dist-epoch]

Europeans don't even know what it means to "balance a checkbook", so they must be dumber.

[reactordev]

Yeah but ya’ll have estates…

[thelastgallon]

It 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 (Washington's Dream - SNL)

[mattmaroon]

Huh? 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]

> Most of the world doesn’t have guns.

No guns, but they have solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.

[mattmaroon]

You 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.