Why YSK: If you’re an American (or Liberian/Myanma), simply knowing that 1m~=3.28ft is… not that helpful. Understanding a unit requires lived experience, after all
Well, if you play Minecraft: good news! Blocks in Minecraft are exactly 1m3. If you can close your eyes and visualize a Minecraft grid, you’re probably already surprisingly good at measuring things in meters.
Let’s give it a shot:
- How tall is the average person? A little bit less than
2 blocks2 meters - How wide is the average person? About
1/2 a block1/2 a meter - What’s the furthest a young person can fall before it starts getting painful? Just over
3 blocks3 meters - How big is the average room? About
6x6 blocks6x6 meters
Some players might even be familiar with kilometers if they use waypoint mods, such as Xaero’s Minimap. If a map marker says it’s 1000 blocks away, that’s 1km. How long does it take a healthy person to walk 1000 blocks 1 kilometer? About 10 minutes!
I love when they’re called freedom units.
What’s that in freedom units?
Sounds ridiculous in a good way.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” ― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing