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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

In fact, TFA notes this:

> Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base

Ah yes, the SI unit of distance obviously being the hour. (For an aircraft mishap in particular, this is more ambiguous than usual.)

It was probably written by a reporter based in LA, where we measure distance in hours/minutes.

And speed is in football fields per hour?

Hours per gallon, actually.

speed is distance over time, so obviously hours-per-hour.

"Traffic was really bad; we were only going half-an-hour per hour..."

The kids will shorten it in slang to just the unitless dimension. "Rick's car is really fast; we got it up over 2.5 yesterday!"

Oddly enough, household energy consumption is often stated in kWh/year. Being that hours per year is a bit under 10,000 one can convert this kWh/year ridiculousness onto simple W, and the resulting amount is only one order of magnitude different. But I guess it helps people annualize their their electric bill (monthly statements being in kWh) without much math.

In the course of doing some energy improvements (and considering various options), I used the rule of the thumb that 1W continuous costs $2/yr, which was more than close enough mathematically, surely made the math easier to do in my head, and was in the units of the actual tradeoff that I was making (buy an efficiency improvement for $Y, save $Z/yr).

That seems to be generally a US thing. Many of my colleagues from Texas, Washington and Virginia tell distance in minutes/hours that they (would have) spent driving. It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". They mean that it depends on the traffic but I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.

> It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends".

I hadn’t noticed that before but I probably will now. That does seem to be a US thing. Often a person will respond in units of distance and time, one after the other. It does make sense given the effect that traffic conditions in a city can have on the travel time but “how far?” “it depends” is really funny.

> I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.

My thought was their home is some kind of moving fortress. A city on the back of a turtle wandering along the coast.

I think there's an implicit cultural understanding that when someone here asks how far away something is, what they really want to know is how long it will take them to drive there.

IMO this is the case in Texas too and it honestly works a lot better there because in LA an hour is very different at 5PM and 10PM. (Still different in TX cities, but to a lesser extent and for a smaller time period.)

Come to think about it, time vs miles/km feels more natural in most situations I can think of.

In London we would describe a journey based on time (or maybe stops, but only for very short train journeys) not distance.

Same for international travel- measured in flight time not distance travelled.

Because in most situations knowing how far away something is takes second place to knowing how long to get there. That’s what is relevant.

Now as to this crash location, I guess it means 2 hours by car but yeah it’s more ambiguous than a more widely understood journey.

Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)

Two hours is a common unit for storm chasers!

The only logical explanation is its about 150 degree minutes.

two and a half hours walking? riding a bike? driving in a car? flying in a jet? traveling in the ISS?

Parsecs

Unladen Swallow

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