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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

Is it that, or is it a compound unit that has a defined width and height already? Something can be five football fields long by two football fields wide, for an area of ten football fields.

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This example illustrates potential confusion around non-square pixels. 5 football fields long makes perfect sense, but I'm not sure if 2 football fields wide means "twice the width of a football field" or "width equaling twice the length of a football field". I would lean towards the latter in colloquial usage, which means that the area is definitely not the same as the area of 10 football fields

I would lean towards the former. I really don't think people are trying to compare the width to the length when discussing football fields casually.

If I told you parking spots are about two bowling lane's wide... I'm obviously not trying to say they are 120ft wide.

I don't think that's obvious at all if you're talking about the length and the width and not describing something I know to be much smaller in any dimension than the length of a lane.

No, it is a count. Pixels can have different sizes and shapes, just like apples. Technically football fields vary slightly too but not close to as much as apples or pixels.

What's the standard size of a city block, the other countable example given by the original author?

Yes, city blocks are like pixels or apples. They do not have a standard size or shape.

Edit: To clarify, if someone says 3 blocks that could vary by like a factor of like 3 or in extreme caesx more so when used as a unit of length it is a very rough estimate. It is usually used in my country as a way to know when you have reached your destination.

Pixel counts generally represent areas by taking the number of pixels inside a region of the plane, but they can represent lengths by taking the number of pixels inside a certain extent of a single line or column of the grid: it is, actually, a thin rectangle.

Football fields also have the fun property of varying in the third dimension. They're built with a crown in the middle so that water will drain off towards the edges, and that can vary significantly between instances.

And pixels are even starting to vary in the third dimension too, with the various curved and bendable and foldable displays.

Pixels used to be realized non-flat in the CRT days.

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