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 blocks 2 meters
  • How wide is the average person? About 1/2 a block 1/2 a meter
  • What’s the furthest a young person can fall before it starts getting painful? Just over 3 blocks 3 meters
  • How big is the average room? About 6x6 blocks 6x6 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!

  • @[email protected]
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    441 year ago

    How wide is the average person? About 1/2 a block 1/2 a meter

    This advice doesn’t apply to Americans

    • @blueskiesoc
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      101 year ago

      I love when they’re called freedom units.

      What’s that in freedom units?

      Sounds ridiculous in a good way.

      • @CAVOK
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        111 year ago

        “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

      • jerry
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        51 year ago

        I like imperial, it’s the proper term and it sounds fancy.

        • @blueskiesoc
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          51 year ago

          Git yer royals off our units, we fought a war for that, but we’ll fight a war for anything, so…

      • @T156
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        21 year ago

        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

        • @blueskiesoc
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          1 year ago

          Yeah. All because republicans were pissed that France didn’t want to invade Iraq with us.

          Here’s a link for those that don’t know.

        • @[email protected]
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          21 year ago

          “Freedom fries” was, the rest of them were jokes making fun of how stupid freedom fries were.

          Source: I was there at the time

    • konalt
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      81 year ago

      Neither does the 1 kilometer metric.

    • Nanachi
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      51 year ago

      An average american is 26 big macs tall

      • sophs
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        41 year ago

        Is there a TheyDidTheMath on lemmy already? I need to know if this is accurante.