Units of Measurement


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Here's one from How it Works a UK popular science mag aimed I guess at kids. The heart-shaped mark on Pluto discovered by the 2015 probe New Horizons was, we are told, caused by a "slow motion glancing collision with an icy rock wider than Kansas is long."

Why a British magazine is using as a unit of measurement a US state that most of us this side of the Atlantic would have difficultly in identifying from a short list of three - (unless the other two were Alaska and Hawaii ) is beyond me but there we go.

It's the wider than long aspect of it though that really confuses me.
 
JunkMonkey said:
Here's one from How it Works a UK popular science mag aimed I guess at kids. The heart-shaped mark on Pluto discovered by the 2015 probe New Horizons was, we are told, caused by a "slow motion glancing collision with an icy rock wider than Kansas is long."

Why a British magazine is using as a unit of measurement a US state that most of us this side of the Atlantic would have difficultly in identifying from a short list of three - (unless the other two were Alaska and Hawaii ) is beyond me but there we go.

It's the wider than long aspect of it though that really confuses me.
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Americans would have trouble identifying Kansas on a map of the US which included the state borders but no descriptions.

And exactly how big are Hawaii or Alaska? They are easy to find (along with Florida and Texas) but for size - who would use any of these for a reference?

BTW -- Kansas is about 400 miles wide. Similar to the distance from the White Cliffs of Dover to Glasgow.

I'm becoming weirdly obsessed with this Kansas vs. England comparison.
Total Land area - Kansas 82,278 square miles
England 51,235 square miles. You might add in Wales 21,212 square miles. ---
So Kansas is about 10% larger land area than turning England and Wales into a rectangle.

The State of Washington is 71,298 Square Miles so that's about the size of England and Wales as a rectangle.

OR the UK is 94,354 square miles. As a rectangle that is about the size of Wyoming at 97,813 square miles.

And now this:
The Florida peninsula is about 390 long. That might have been a reasonable reference for the show.




 
Note that none of the "rectangular" US states (well, there are only two, Colorado and Wyoming) are rectangular: their southern borders are longer than their northern borders.
 
Ursa major said:
Note that none of the "rectangular" US states (well, there are only two, Colorado and Wyoming) are rectangular: their southern borders are longer than their northern borders.
Click to expand...
Such is the nature of the Earth. The Jeffersonian grid that defines all of those "straight" borders is really fascinating. But I digress into actual geography.

Here is a simplistic explanation of the Jeffersonian grid from Amusing Planet.
 
Cthulhu.Science said:
The Jeffersonian grid that defines all of those "straight" borders
Click to expand...
Speaking of straight lines....

A few decades back, I bought some of the Rand McNally "backroads" state maps (mostly from the western US) and as well as the road maps, they included ones showing BLM (Bureau of Land Management) lands and similar (identified by different colours/tints), with some areas looking like the boards used to play draughts/checkers. Here's an example (from another, online, source):

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It has always troubled me, this thing about the density of a grain of sand from a neutron star.
Surely a grain of sand from the centre of a neutron star is far more dense than one from its periphery.

Mind you. I used to know a couple of people who lived at the centre of Oxford who must weigh at least twice as much as most of the people who live around the edge. But I would classify only one of them as being particularly dense. ;)
 
The How it Works magazine (the one with the 'wider than Kansas is long' thing mentioned above) does a thing that REALLY
irritates. They constantly mix Metric and Imperial measurements on the same page. Most of the time they use use metric. Great. Good. Fantastic. All for it. But then, suddenly, when lengths or distances become greater, they use miles and often on the same page as metric measurements.

A few examples:

Issue 173 page 39 "3: Instrument Deployment Arm This 1.8 meter long robotic arm..." but "1 Caloris Montes: This mountain range extending for more than 620 miles..."

Issue 167 page 29 " ... flying above the speed of sound at an altitude of 30 meters..." and "Subsonic 1 to 767 miles per hour."

Issue 179 page Pg 28 "9.8 meters per second - The rate at which falling objects accelerate in Earth's Gravity" and, on the same infographic, "6.8 Miles per second - Speed needed to escape Earth's gravitational pull."

This last one is particularly annoying when you consider some things do both - escape the Earth's gravitational pull and later fall back - a SpaceX booster that returns to Earth for instance. At what point would you stop measuring its flight speed in imperial and start measuring in metric?

They really jump the shark though when the metres pile up:

In issue 180 on page 59 - "Using the LRV, astronauts Charles Duke and John Young travelled over 16 miles across three moonwalks..." while just above that, on the same page, we read: "Astronaut Alan Shephard trekked more than 2,700 metres across the Moon's surface."

2,700 metres is 2.7 Km, which is 1.7 miles. Why is one distance given in metres and the other in miles? It makes no sense.

Or issue 178 page 24 in the article about asteroids: "...or approximately 4.65 million miles..." while "433 Eros Diameter 16,840 meters" -
16,840 meters is 10.46 miles.

I know British road mileages are still given in... erm... miles for some reason (possibly known only to the people who saw the size of the budget involved in changing every roadsign in the UK, and the fact that the word 'kilometerage', which would replace 'mileage', is just horrible) but there's no need to mix things up like this in a magazine aimed at kids. Kids have no real concept of what a mile is in real terms any more than they have of what a kilometre is. It's 'a long way'. But it would be easier for them (and me) to understand how relative sizes were in comparison with each other if they (and I) weren't being asked to compare apples, to oranges (or cucumbers), or do converting maths on every page.

I got so fed up with being annoyed by this sort of thing I cancelled my subscription.
 
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