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Comment by Denvercoder9 | Hacker News Reader

> Also it is a good idea to use metric units for science articles.

It's not if you're writing for an American audience that's more familar with imperial units.

Pushes up glasses. Well, actually, the United States of America has never used Imperial Units. We have used US Customary Units which share some of the more common names. But the definitions and sizes are not the same, nor are all the names. Also, since 1893 US Customary Units have been defined in terms of SI units.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Act_of_1866 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

We should just define that outer space uses metric units. The average american won't know the difference between "a million miles" and "a million kilometers", because they're both way beyond the realm of practical experience.

As an American, about 1.6.

600,000 kilometers is 1.5 times as far from Earth as the Moon. Interesting to think how much longer it took Webb to cover that distance than Apollo. A consequence of not being able to slow down under power.

JWST is around 1.5 million km, but that just illustrates my point. Being off by a factor of two makes no practical difference if you're not working on the mission.

Haha, I multiplied by 0.6 instead of 1.6. Good enough to crash a climate orbiter.

Then you can use football fields as measurement unit, following that argument. Or bananas.

There's a reason things like football fields are commonly used as measurements in science communication: it actually helps the average person to get a sense of scale.

But it also makes it impossible to compare things. A lot of these articles switch from tennis court to football field to school bus to width of a hair. I would be ok if they wrote something like “100m long which is about the size of a football field”. But I really hate that they omit the numbers. I have no idea how many tennis courts fit into an football field and how that translates to school buses. And I bet most people don’t know either. But I know that 30 meters fits 3.3 times into 100 meters. This kind of writing manipulates people and keeps them dumb.

The same happens in politics. They often omit that when they write that something costs 100 billion that this is actually over 20 years. Another time they bring up a number that’s over 5 years 1 year. Whatever is more convenient for the story.

All this writing seems designed not to educate and inform but to keep people dumb and to appeal to the emotions the author wants to effect.

Does it make a difference if it's 100m or 110m or 90m?? For a general audience? Obviously it does not, the point is to convey the scale/order of magnitude. Is it about the size of a person? An elephant? A bus? A football pitch? That's what is being communicated here.

'Football fields' seem particularly vague as there are half a dozen different sports called football, and each of these have different sized fields.

There are quite a few miles too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile_(disambiguation)

Yeah, and there used to be more. That's why people standardized the meter.

But tennis courts are very common in America. Every high school around here has at least 2. Many parks have them. The fitness center I go to has 2 external and 1 internal tennis courts.

They’re not “imperial” units, since those were set by the British Empire in the first part of the 1800s, and the Americans never adopted them.

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