What's with the obsession for football fields as a unit of distance?
So, which is it? :)
what's with the hate on measuring things in football fields, aside from some hand-waving about it being "unscientific"? like yeah don't use it in a research paper but i don't see a problem with it.
Akin to stadia.
I never quibble with these types of comparisons, except for Libraries of Congress when trying to convey the amount of data something can hold.
I have no idea how large the LoC is. My touchstone for data capacity is MP3s (128k/48kHz, of course :)
As far as football fields goes, I’d think it works best because gridirons and pitches are roughly the same size. Almost everyone has had experience with at least one of those, right?
That's one BIG egg!
Perhaps the sport should be called Prolate Spheroid Carry.
I'm pretty sure it's the blue whale that comes closest to 100 yards
Looked it up (Wikipedia) :
"Adult North Atlantic right whales average 13–16 m (43–52 ft) in length"
"the longest scientifically measured individual blue whale was 30 meters (98 ft) from rostrum tip to tail notch."
You're going to need at least three blue whales to get close, I'd throw in a north atlantic right just to be safe.
If you're from Europe, sure I get that you might not get it. Although a soccer field is about the same size.
If you're American, maybe you're just sensitive about not like sports? A visceral discomfort around sports is pretty common amongst tech people (now that's a "bubble.")
Hell, you don't need to be a sports bro to understand something more specific - say, the difference between a block and charge in basketball. Because sport stuff is just a core part of general American culture. Like primetime TV (even if you don't watch it.)
Have we? Is it really that common if you aren't a player/cheerleader? I have stood on an American football field only once and that's because I was helping out a friend capture audio of the game. I've certainly seen them on TV, but that doesn't really give a great sense of distance. I've seen the Statue of Liberty on TV a lot and that's about a 100 yards too.
I think that people keep complaining about it because it's clearly a flawed way to measure something, but people still keep using it because we don't really have something better to replace it with. We just don't have enough things around us that are measured reliably and consistently I guess.
(Plus some buffer area all around, etc).
In many places in Ohio (where I'm from) it's pretty standard for the 400m track to surround the football field and for the stands to do dual use.
Source: too many years of marching band in HS.
But that's neither here nor there. Using football fields as unit of measurement is odd. You don't see metric countries resorting to using soccer pitches as unit of measurement.
Unfortunately Germany does.
This is not a argument for the size of a meter itself, it's simply noting that we've made a system of related measurements using base 10. We could get the same result using "football field" as the base unit of length and make 1 cubic football field equal to 1000 "swimming pools" (volume).
You know, the precise definition in use for 129 years since 1893 .. the one used to ensure one measured "foot" matched another . . .
More interesting, maybe, is the length of the Dynastic Egyptian cubit: pi/6 meters, 52.36cm.
So, measure the Great Pyramid's King's Chamber: 10x10x20 cubits, exactly. Or, as exactly as the Egyptians could manage, somewhere between 3 and 4 significant digits. Very precise, for masonry.
That is thus 5.236x etc. meters. But 5.236 is also, by divine coincidence, 2phi² = 2(phi+1), and also, by even more blessed coincidence, 5pi/3, to five significant places, closer than the Egyptians could measure.
(Recall, phi = (sqrt(5)+1)/2 ~ 1.61803... pi ~ 3.14149265...)
So the King's Chamber, measured in meters, but only in meters, is both 2phi² meters and 5pi/3 meters wide. (Or 5tau/6, if you prefer.) And, of course, twice that long.
Some people are bold enough to suggest that when the meter's length was chosen, the guff about Earth's circumference was a shuck. By another divine coincidence, the Royal cubit of France was also 0.5236 m, equal to the Dynastic cubit, and the corresponding "span" (equal to 1/phi² cubits) was exactly 20 cm.
At the time the meter was defined, the French had not yet invaded Egypt. Could a masonic tradition preserve ancient measure through two millennia after the last dynasty?
Some people insist the diagonal, from one corner of the chamber to its opposite is special. But it is just 10sqrt(6) cubits, or 10.00+2sqrt(2) meters... to three places. Another coincidence.
Numerology is all fun and games today, but to the ancients it was all deadly serious business.
I feel like this might be slightly retconned to fit nicely. From what I've read the Egyptian cubit sticks actually varied in length by a couple of centimeters.
You do have to calibrate to the King's Chamber cubit, which seems defensible. But the numbers do check out: 2phi²/(5pi/3) = 1.000015 is pretty trippy, no matter how you slice it. Likewise 5sqrt(6)pi/3-2sqrt(2) = 9.997.
There's no denying the ancients would be impressed with that sort of thing. Maybe even Newton, too. Of course, none of this proves the Egyptians knew about any of it.
Probably the lesson for us is that numerical coincidences are way more common and less significant than we are inclined to think.
[Also: pi ~ 3.14159265...]
All the same, telling people that the USofA was one of the very first adopters of the SI metric system and still bases all its measures on metric will get you a few odd looks.
"The pulse is 1.6 plasma wavelengths long", "the shock front is on the order of 2 laser wavelengths thick", etc
SI dimensions (again, in my sub-field) were treated more as a manufacturing spec for experimental equipment than as a convenient way to discuss phenomena or a good way to communicate the size of something with someone else in the field.