Well said, Pierre. ! m is the length of my arm to my nose, one tenth of it is the width of my palm, etc, 100 m is the length of the 100 m dash that everybody runs or observes in schools and in athletic events, and 1 km was the distance from my house I used to cover walking or biking to my best friend's home (hat length has been in my mind for 60 years)..
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wednesday, June 26, 2013 11:45:28 Henschel Mark wrote: > > Well, I can help you visualize the size of metric units. > > > > I think of a hectare as two football fields side by side. > > This is useless to me, as I don't watch football. > > > Think of a kilometer as five city blocks. Or a railroad train 60 cars > long. > > Or perhaps three Eiffel towers or ten Statues of Liberty. Then this > > distance in two dimensions would be an approximation to visualize a > square > > kilometer. (Perhaps 25 city blocks in many US cities) > > Train cars vary in length. City blocks vary widely. Kilometers don't. > > I know it's 50 m to a certain tree, 200 m straight-line to the interstate, > and > 1 km by road to the nearest exit. But that doesn't help anyone else > visualize > distances. > > Besides calculations of L/m² of rain or kg/m² of seed, there were some guys > who were building a fence. They figured how much fencing they needed per > 100 m, > then every 0.1 km the guy inside the pickup told the guy in the back to > throw > some. > > Pierre > -- > .i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do > .ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga > .icu'u la ma'atman. > >
