Dr. Maddkap, WerepsychologistAmericans will really do anything to avoid using the metric system.
The Duality of Xan@drmaddkap Ah yes, the emperor penguin, a well known unit of measurement with which all people in North America will be intimately familiar.
Jeff Grigg... compared to, say, a "yard" (three foot long), which is almost as long as a meter. And many people have used "yard sticks" of that length. A "yard" is just over 8.5 cm short of a meter.
So about 24 yards wide, as a really rough number.
"Nearly to the 25 yard line on a football field" would do it!
wb x64@JeffGrigg @XanIndigo @drmaddkap I just aggressively swap meters and yards, it's almost always close enough for guesswork. Also being a difference of 2.54, you can guesstimate centimeters as being either 1/2 or 1/3 of an inch, whichever you feel like. Finally 1 mile is about 1½ km, a gallon is about 4 liters, and there's about 2 pounds per kg. 20°C is about room temperature, 10°C is jacket weather, & 30°C is beach weather.
Attempts at precision suck.
Frank@fschaap @JeffGrigg @XanIndigo @drmaddkap Americans are getting used to liters (we have 1L and 2L and sometimes even 3L soda and water bottles), meters are much easier to understand when directly translated as yards, grams are great for baking, and the new generation of 3D printing enthusiasts measure exclusively in millimeters, but we just don't have much of a daily use for other stuff. (See: UK still using stones for body weight?)
@fschaap @JeffGrigg @XanIndigo @drmaddkap one advantage of feet, pounds, and fahrenheit is that they're human-scale measures: everyone has a foot, a pound is about can of beans or a pound-cake-tin-sized bread or cake, it's like the lightest item you'd consider as having heft. And 0°F is unreasonably cold but livable while 100°F is unreasonably hot but livable. SI prefixes are great, but it's hard to visualize 1000 of something.