How to measure in a very stupid way - Part One
You know what really pisses me off? People using stupid units for measuring.
One could say: "Well, just ignore it. Stay calm.", but I simply can't ignore it anymore. Even newspapers and other media use it nowadays. In this article I will point out some examples I heard or read. Decide for yourself if they annoy you as much as they annoy me.
Measuring the area - or - the soccer field problem
I guess many of you are familiar with units like square meters, or even more exotic units like hectare. These are all ok (except that I personally don't like measuring things in hectares, but that's not the topic). What bothers me is the constant analogy to soccer fields. An example: "Every second, an area from the size of a soccer field is cut down.". WHY can't they use square meters? Soccer fields aren't even the same size everywhere! They have a very large range. So please, stop using that analogy.
Measuring the volume of fluids - or - the bath tub problem
Same as above, (even though a friend told me that the standard bath tub has 180 litres of volume) why can't they just use liters? Or cubic meters?
Measuring the chance - or - the lottery problem
Instead of saying: "The chance of this is 50 times higher than winning the lottery.", why don't we use the common syntax 1:xxx? No one can imagine the chance of winning the lottery anyway...
There are a bunch of other analogies that annoy me, more to follow ;).