Why YSK: If you’re an American (or Liberian/Myanma), simply knowing that 1m~=3.28ft is… not that helpful. Understanding a unit requires lived experience, after all
Well, if you play Minecraft: good news! Blocks in Minecraft are exactly 1m3. If you can close your eyes and visualize a Minecraft grid, you’re probably already surprisingly good at measuring things in meters.
Let’s give it a shot:
- How tall is the average person? A little bit less than
2 blocks2 meters - How wide is the average person? About
1/2 a block1/2 a meter - What’s the furthest a young person can fall before it starts getting painful? Just over
3 blocks3 meters - How big is the average room? About
6x6 blocks6x6 meters
Some players might even be familiar with kilometers if they use waypoint mods, such as Xaero’s Minimap. If a map marker says it’s 1000 blocks away, that’s 1km. How long does it take a healthy person to walk 1000 blocks 1 kilometer? About 10 minutes!
How wide is the average person? About 1/2 a block 1/2 a meter
This advice doesn’t apply to Americans
An average american is 26 big macs tall
I love when they’re called freedom units.
What’s that in freedom units?
Sounds ridiculous in a good way.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing
Wasn’t that just part of the Cold War/Terror War fervour? Where everything was freedom something or other.
Freedom fries, Freedom Units, Freedom bangstick, Freedom Vroom Vroom, etc
1 meter is roughly 17 football field bud lights per ar-15.
I like imperial, it’s the proper term and it sounds fancy.
Git yer royals off our units, we fought a war for that, but we’ll fight a war for anything, so…
Honestly these are the sort of shortcuts a teacher should embrace. Personally i just had the idea of flooding public schools with metric rulers but this is even better
Are there non-metric meters?
Another useful tip: because the conversion rate of 1.609 miles to kilometers is so close to the golden ratio (1.618), you can use the Fibonacci sequence to estimate a conversion.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …
5 miles is about 8km, 8 miles is about 13km, etc
I knew this but never though to actually use it this way. Good tip!
“Whot to heck, how is this YSK?.. Oh it is a freedom thing”
Welp…I’m just glad a younger audience is on lemmy.
Man, I’m 27 years old. Minecraft came out while I was in middleschool. I appreciate being called young… but I’m dealing with very adult feeling things at this stage in my life, like a balding scalp and dead parents.
Sorry for your loss, mate 😞 Hope things start leveling out for you.
It’s OK. I was never really that attached to my hair in the first place
i feel like this falls apart pretty quickly lol
Approximations in imperial units helps me a lot. A meter is a yard, a centimeter is about 3/8" (2.5 per inch), a millimeter is about 1/32" (half a 16th). Everyone knows how big two liters is from soda bottles. A kilogram is about two pounds. Room temperature is 20°C while 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling. 50°C is about 120°F.
If we need precision we can break out the measures, we just need to have a gut sense of this stuff.
