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"Mark 3.656!"

40 x 43,560 sq. ft. and a mule.

Or stuff like vertical window blinds that are 127 mm wide, and sold as such.

Always thought they should slip some of these into Star Trek Universal-Translated dialogue.

Meanwhile 33 feet would be...incorrect. 10M = ~31ft.

Inconseavable!

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"

No. 98.6 F is 37 C. Exactly. 100.4 F is 38 C. Exactly. The body temperature definitions are not so precise they require a decimal place in Fahrenheit. Normal body temp is just defined as 37 ± 1 C. It's simply a rough measurement in a less granular scale. It's *very* imprecise.

A term I learned from The Lord of the Rings.

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.

And there's also 568ml which is 20 UK ounces, not to be confused with 591 ml which is 20 US ounces

<Record scratch> That's me, on my eighth hour of running back and forth between the factory titration burettes and the weight room as Coca Cola forces me to fill soda cans to three sigfigs. And, shit, I forgot to account for the glass deformation in my burette again. KMN. Please. 😭

Apart from watching an acclaimed TV series or two about that industry, I wouldn’t know

🤔

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

www.reddit.com/r/todayilear...

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

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".

no that one is actually just a dude sucked at measuring when he set the scale.

I mean no, it was supposed to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit

I think that ones actually a happy coinkadink

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.

I still remember a question that was basically this from a frosh physics quiz after the unit on unit conversions, more than 30 years later: Assuming warp X is X times the speed of light, how fast does the Enterprise go in furlongs per fortnight when Kirk says "Warp 2"?

We had firkins to complete the set.

I measure my Terminator series rewatches in Furlongs to Fortnight as well.

I always liked slugs per foot squared as a unit of pressure.

Must've been using the furlong–firkin–fortnight system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFF_system?wprov=sfla1

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

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

Generally rounded up to 2 Km for lip-sync purposes. This generally comes up with distances in feet though. 30 feet are give or take 9 m, for example

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.

Fahrenheit pegged 0 on the scale using a mixture that would retain an independent equilibrium temperature. The approximate human body temp was 96 degrees based on this scale and the scale was revised 2 years later to round out water's freezing point, which put the human body at 98.6 degrees.

no, no part of it has anything to do with 37C

I did not know that, thanks!

We used to think boiling water just kept getting hotter, and freezing water just kept getting colder. It took the invention of Fahrenheit's thermometer and the scale he created for it to figure out how heat works well enough to make a better scale. That's why the F scale is so weird.

my junior high science teacher hit me with his car and smoked meth in the computer lab

Fahrenheit himself had it at 96 (apparently to make the distance from the freezing point for water a multiple of 2), but Royal Society revised the scale (to make 212 the boiling point for water) so it became 98.6.

Oh Fahrenheit you kinky freak that’s a sly way to grope your wife in a laboratory.

I always thought that since he anchored the scale with 100 as normal wife body temp, that zero should have been frozen wife. But brine was probably experimentally more practical.

"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.)

Climb to 12.192 kilometers!

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