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Comment by pingou | Hacker News Reader

"With a bomb dropped once every 62 minutes, the equivalent of three football fields of reef are destroyed each year, according to Williams."

That doesn't sound right.

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I love the American measurement units. How many bald eagles of explosives are needed to destroy three football fields worth of reef?

The quote you're referring to came from the study's lead author, a Brit. Presumably he was referring to soccer (which everyone else calls "football"). Furthermore, a soccer field and an American football field are reasonably close in area, so it gets the point across in any case.

However, I will now refer to explosives exclusively in units of Bald Eagles when referring to their mass, and "star spangles" when referring to their energy output.

Don't Brits usually call it a football pitch?

Football field and pitch are fairly interchangeable in the UK.

Brits actually originally called it soccer. They changed to football at some point a while back. Maybe he's doing a super-throwback?

By analogy with another type of football, i.e. rugby football which was nicknamed rugger in the old days. Soccer was always a nickname, and association football the formal name.

The term "football" was used in medieval England to refer to sports played on foot as opposed to on horseback. There was a class element too as football games (of which there were many types) were played by the common man while equestrian sports were the realm of the elites. There were even laws passed regulating how much "football" could be played so it wouldn't distract from other peasant responsibilities.

This isn't a uniquely American thing to be fair, in the UK it's not unusual to discuss area in terms of football pitches or for very large areas, Wales.

The rest of the world has moved on to the metric system. Even NASA did.

UK should not hold us back with their shenanigans.

To be fair, who actually has a mental model of what 20,779 square kilometres or 8,023 square miles (the area of Wales expressed as a number) actually looks like? Doesn't matter if you're using imperial or metric, it's not very intuitive beyond the human scale.

If you're trying to communicate 'this much rainforest disappeared' or 'look how large this landmass-sized Antarctic iceberg is' to a wide audience a well-known area is a reasonable way to do it. In Britain basically everyone knows roughly what the size of Wales is relative to the other countries of the UK, even if they don't know its exact size.

20,779 square kilometres you say? Thats trivial, its roughly strip of 20km that is 1000km long. Or 200x100km. If you can't imagine that, thats mostly problem of your practical imagination, I have the image of such area in my head immediately and can map it into various parts of regions around me rather easily.

I don't play football, nor soccer nor rugby nor baseball or similar sports, just like you most probably don't climb on rock. I am not pushing my metric of '2 spans of typical rope length for alpine tightrope 2-people setup ' or similar obscure metric, do I.

What is good about metric is that once you have a good feel for different lengths of mm, cm,meters and kilometres you don’t need to worry about things like “10 Super Bowl stadiums”. You can easily extrapolate what 27km2 means, it doesn’t have to “look like” anything.

That really isn't true. You in particular may be good at such extrapolation, but people as a rule are not. They need a concrete example to relate back to.

I cycle a lot and you get a very good feel for what 20kms feels like guess, so maybe you’re right.

Even NASA uses AUs and degrees which are both not metric.

The UK is arguably worse than the US in this regard. The US has mainly stayed with a system that sticks to one measurement across use cases. If I burn fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallons, I purchase it at the pump in gallons. If Tommy Atkins burns fuel at a rate of x miles per y gallon, he purchases it at the pump in liters; there's an extra step for conversion.

Ah, but minutes (or an hour) don't have any context to a person. "A bomb dropped every two thirds of the duration of a football game, excluding breaks". No, that sounds too mathy. Perhaps "three bombs per two games".

four to five Big Mac's worth.

advanced question for the college types: how many if you supersize it?

Which supersize, with shrinkflation applied or illegal in NY?

What a low value comment. In this case, a European football (soccer) field/pitch is reasonably close in size to an American football field. If the article had used square feet or acres, your comment might be more relevant. Google tells me that FIFA football pitch size is 105 meters long by 68 meters wide (7140 sq m). American football field size is 110 meters long by 53 meters wide (5830 sq m).

Soccer has no fixed pitch size, only upper and lower bounds on the width and height where the size must fall into

You’d be surprised how vulnerable aquatic organisms are, and how far energy travels in water after an explosion…

I think the point is the opposite, I also expected a lot more damage from a bomb every hour

I'd suspect that the goal isn't to destroy coral reefs and the damage is "accidental." And/or the reefs are already largely fucked, so additional damage is "minimal."

To be clear, coral reefs are essentially collectors/attractors/homes for a huge number of fish species. If you go away from a coral reef (even 50 meters), there is large drop-off in the amount of fish in the water column -- almost none. They are absolutely bomb fishing within coral reefs because there are lots of fish.

Yeah, but the reefs aren't the goal. They're probably mostly not blowing up reef, but occasionally do it it - hence why so many bombs clears so little reef. If it was massively reducing reef coverage, you'd expect to see the method die off once too much reef is gone.

Fishers, I would guess, are aware of fish wanting to be near reefs.

I would assume the area was larger than reported. I mean that's 24*365 bombs per year.

I'd assume the deployment isn't always over reefs?

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