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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

It's really strange how "football fields" or "Olympic swimming pools" etc became such common comparison points for news headlines. Isn't the universality kind of the appeal of having units of measurement? I'd argue most people see things that are a meter long a lot more often than football fields.

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To me the point of these is not to explain size but more to address the feeling of "it's bigger than the biggest thing you might have experienced"

An other common reference in Japan is the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium also used for live performances, and it feels exactly the same as telling someone you store 5 Library of Congress worth of data in your NAS.

Business Insider is a US publication so they are using a unit that makes sense to their readership. Everyone in the US has a sense for the size of a football field. In this case it seems like an appropriate comparison. I immediately realize this is a significant change that would impact things like docks and boat ramps.

This intuition works for any reasonable interpretation of "football field".

If we are talking about how far Voyager has traveled then you may have an interesting critique.

It's an approximation. If you say 220 meters, you have no wiggle room. If you say two football field's length you get the idea and it leaves wiggle room. Meters are too precise in this case.

If they had said furlong, that would be about right and gives enough coarseness to the measure to be effective. Unfortunately, with horseracing dying not many people are familiar with the measure any more.

But they even gave an exact number in feet—about 820! About because it’s 820.21 to match the exact 250m. Where’s the wiggle room now.

Pumping up the grandiose factor; a meter is tangible and can be imagined 100x, but football fields are really big!

I propose using multiples of 1% of the length of the 100m dash. Maybe we can find a shorthand way to write it.

For me, a few hundred meters is difficult to comceptualize. I can search a football arena and notice the people around/inside it and get a better feel for the story than if just presented in meters

It's also weird to use a football field as a unit of length not area.

Not really, as in American football, the goal is to traverse some specific length, so no one really thinks about the area in much detail. For example, I could tell you that a football field is 120 yards in length (100 yards for the actual play area and 10 yards on each side for the endzone) but I could not tell you the width off the top of my head.

53.3 yards wide. Or 160 feet.

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