Japan's earthquake alters coastline, extends it by two football fields

Hold on there!

Are talking about American American football fields, or Canadian American football fields? Or American arena football fields?

About that, yeah…

> Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football). The latter term was further shortened to “soccer” (sometimes spelled “socker”), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, “soccer” never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football.

> Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word. As a result, American association-football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their sport.

https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-people-call-foo...

Let’s not forget, the article doesn’t say if it’s a length of 2.2 American football fields lengths or widths. But we can deduce that.

Note to German readers: not Igels as your German NFL rtl nitro staff calls them.

Did you use the American bald eagle wingspan (latitudinal) length or the length (longitudinal) of the said bald eagle from the tip of the beak to the end of the tail in your calculations?

Considering the length of an American football field to be 109.73 metres (120 yards), and an average wingspan for the bald eagle to be 2 metres (approximately 6.7 feet), only 107 bald eagles would equate to the length of a single football field.

However, if you used an average longitudinal length of 86.5 cm for the American bald eagle, one football field would equate to approximately 127 bald eagles in length, and then you have a rounding error that has crept into your calculations.

You know why Americans call soccer soccer? Because Britain. Pick a name and stick with it, dammit.

I think it works here because it gives a sense like "imagine two new football fields showed up on your local coastline". But then maybe that's not the right sense. It could be true for miles of coastline. Regardless it is a significant change.

Maybe practically everyone "in America"

Not really, as in American football, the goal is to traverse some specific length, so no one really thinks about the area in much detail. For example, I could tell you that a football field is 120 yards in length (100 yards for the actual play area and 10 yards on each side for the endzone) but I could not tell you the width off the top of my head.

But they even gave an exact number in feet—about 820! About because it’s 820.21 to match the exact 250m. Where’s the wiggle room now.

Aren't the marked in between the centimetres? And aren't they useful if you're working with something that was originally measured in inches and you're doing a lot of cuts of 2.54cm etc.?

If you're going to pick one unit for unambiguous measurements for most day-to-day use, you could do a lot worse than mm.

I have never seen a tape measure in the US without both scales.

I have a tape measure in mm and have absolutely no issue using it to measure things up to 5m in length. It’s trivial to convert in your head between mm, cm, and meters and record whatever unit makes the most sense. Or it’s also fine to just work in mm for largish objects - anyone with any experience with metric units should have no trouble visualizing a car, for example, that is 4,555 mm long. And car dimensions are routinely given in mm by manufacturers on websites, pamphlets, etc for use by the general public.

So I think mm should be just fine for a bookshelf, unless it’s 10+ meters long.

BTW I am an American who grew up using feet/inches, and am now a total metric system convert. I too grow tired of the endless snarky remarks every time someone uses a non-SI unit on the internet, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the US way (and other countries who still use non-SI units for certain applications, the US isn’t the only one although it is perhaps the worst offender) of doing things is somehow better. It’s just the convention that people are familiar with in the US.

You can't multiply by two? The fractional scale is based on reciprocal powers of two. Would it be easier for you if they were denoted in binary? It's the same idea, with the same benefits.

You are conflating two ideas. The fractional scale could be applied to metric units just as well as US customary units. Like how Americans use thousandths of inches in some cases.

Buying "American" tools is no different than buying metric tools. They come in sets with common sizes.

The metric system is in widespread use in the US and has been for decades.

You can choose to interpret the continued use of US Customary units as stubbornness or ignorance but that says more about you than Americans.

I choose to view it as Americans being comfortable using the right tool for the job instead of swinging the same old hammer at every new screw.

The USA is metric but the units have a wrapper over them to mask it from US citizens.

Example NIST website https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/si-units-length

>The value for the inch, derived from the value of the Yard effective July 1, 1959, is exactly equivalent to 25.4 mm.