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Comment by knallfrosch | Hacker News Reader

Happens to all square shapes.

A chessboard is 8 tiles wide and 8 tiles long, so it consists of 64 tiles covering an area of, well, 64 tiles.

Not all pixels are square, though! Does anyone remember anamorphic DVDs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_widescreen

Never mind anamorphic DVDs, all of them use non-square pixels. The resolution of DVD is 720×480 pixels (or squared pixels, referring back to the article); this is a 3:2 ratio of pixel quantities on the horizontal vs. vertical axes. But the overall aspect ratio of the image is displayed as either 4:3 (SDTV) or 16:9 (HDTV), neither of which matches 3:2. Hence the pixel aspect ratio is definitely not 1:1.

City blocks, too.

In the US...

While it is certainly more common in the US we occasionally use blocks as a measurement here in Sweden too. Blocks are just smaller and less regular here.

Do people in Spanish cities with strong grids (eg Barcelona) not also use the local language equivalent of "blocks" as a term? I would be surprised if not. It's a fundamentally convenient term in any area that has a repeated grid.

The fact that some cities don't have repeated grids and hence don't use the term is not really a valuable corrective to the post you are replying to.

In Slavic languages we think in terms of intersections for distance, maybe the same for Spanish? Area is thought of either as inside district (say city enter) or in meters squared.

A block is just the distance from one intersection to the next. Even if those distances vary or are non-square.

E.g. Manhattan has mostly rectangular blocks, if you go from 8th Avenue to Madison Avenue along 39th St you traveled 4 blocks (the last of which is shorter than the first 3), if you go from 36th St to 40th St along 8th Avenue you traveled 4 blocks (all of which are shorter than the blocks between the avenues).

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