On my recent USA vacation, something I noticed quite often was the constant use of “pounds” when discussing pretty massive objects.
This was particularly pronounced when visiting Kennedy Space Centre and being bombarded with facts such as the Saturn V launch weight being 6,500,000 lbs
Also in this thread about the heaviest load lifted by aircraft.
It seems to me that talking in terms of hundreds of thousands or even millions of pounds is unnecessarily confusing and precise. I don’t think humans are capable of intuitively grasping such large numbers.
We have a good grasp of what a pound/kilo is and can pretty easily grasp what 10, 50 or a hundred of them mean. Once we are out of the hundreds I think it is far better to restate in terms of a higher unit. Is this not why we have such units as the ton?
I think talking about a launch weight of 3000 tons is much easier to grasp or visualise, that’s about the weight of 1500 cars, a thousand elephants.
If I said that my children walked to school and it was a distance of 27687 inches you’d think me rather quirky, about 800 yards or roughly half a mile would be a far better way for giving an immediate (thought slightly less accurate) feeling for how far that is.
It would be like expressing my kids ages in days or the length of a movie in seconds or my speed in feet/hour
Is this a particularly USA phenomenon? common in other nations? a minor annoyance and unhelpful to other dopers out there?
I notice it with currencies that haven’t been adjusted for inflation in a long time, where all prices are given in units of the equivalent of a fraction of a cent. For instance, at the moment 20 USD is the equivalent of 2,238 Yen. To me, it would be odd to be told that something was going to cost me 100,000 pennies.
(FWIW, I usually mentally convert tons to pounds to make numbers meaningful.)
What I’ve noticed is that people like one of two things- either restating in the largest unit that they’re familiar with, or they go with some sort of unit, sometimes made up, that puts the numbers in the ranges they prefer- typically somewhere between 1 and 25.
For example, you’ll see things listed in things like thousands of pounds, rather than some nice single-digit number of tons, because most people have no actual conception of what a ton actually is, but most people have a good idea of what a pound is. Similarly, you’ll see distances of more than about 400 yards described in terms of miles (400 yards is more or less a quarter mile),
Or you’ll see things like in Italy, where stuff like salumi is technically measured in grams, but people buy it by the ‘etto’ (100 g), because nobody likes saying ‘350 grams’ or ‘0.35 kg’, but saying “three and a half etto (tre e mezzo etto)” is more intuitive. In the same vein, you’ll often hear distances of over 100 yards and under a quarter mile described in some conveniently small number of ‘football fields’ in the US.
I think this is why people sometimes claim that the US/Imperial system is more ‘intuitive’ or something- a lot of the common units fall into that 1-25 range, while metric units don’t always. Kilograms and liters do, but length measurements don’t, and nor do the sub-measurements- being able to say one and a half oz is a lot more natural than saying 44 ml for example.
It depends on the unit. I also mentally convert a huge number of pounds to tons (and a huge number of acres to square miles) but I’ll take millions of miles over A.U.'s, and teaspoons over milliliters. (But liters instead of hundreds of teaspoons! )
I suspect that “ton” is avoided because it is ambiguous: an American “ton” is less than a European “ton” which is slightly less than a British “ton” (160 stones?).
As for dealing with large monetary amounts, some languages (Thai, Chinese, ???) have monosyllabic words for several powers of ten. If someone wants to buy a house for “2 point 3” you know they’re measuring by millions of baht; selling a used car for “5 point 5” you can assume hundreds of thousands. (People with technical training like two-digit numbers – they might price the car as “55 × ten-thousand” instead of “5.5 × hundred-thousand.”)
For an individual pound I agree, but can people instinctively grasp what a *million *pounds means?
A million is a difficult number to visualise for any purpose.
A million packs of butter can’t easily be visualised but if I said that a ton was a stack of butter-packs was the equivalent of a cube of 16 packs per side then that is easy to imagine.
It is then an easier leap to say that million pounds is the equivalent of 454 of such cubes. I think with the bigger numbers there has to be some intermediate unit that helps expresses the amount in a more approachable manner.
Americans just like stuff to be BIG, and tend not to care about little details like units.
6,500,000 is a BIG number. 3000 is still a relatively big number, but it’s not as impressive as “six and a half million”. It’s not practical, but in that particular case, it’s not meant to be.
I’m going to take a WAG here and say that in the two examples cited in the OP, the maximum load lifted by an aircraft and the Saturn V, it’s because both are essentially related to aviation, where “pounds” is widely used. Aircraft fuel loads, for instance, are always expressed as pounds (or kilograms where metric prevails), not gallons or litres, because weight is critically important and range is readily worked out from that. Probably the same for rockets like the Saturn V, most of whose weight is fuel. Maximum takeoff weight for airplanes is always stated in pounds, even for large aircraft where the MTOW might be hundreds of thousands of pounds. In that case the use of pounds rather than tons is because of the necessary precision.
I kind of think that above some arbitrary threshold, large numbers are simply numbers, and nobody really has a good grasp on how big they are. I mean I don’t have a good handle on 9200 tons vs. 18.4 million lbs- they’re both very large numbers, and happen to be the displacement of Navy destroyers.
Similarly, I can’t really draw a meaningful distinction between 1 parsec/3.26 light years/19 trillion miles. It’s just a LONG way, but it’s totally abstract.
When I think unwieldy units, I think more of units that are either too small to make a difference or too large to be used, like height in centimeters versus meters: the first doesn’t matter and the second doesn’t draw distinctions, which is not true for inches and feet. Same thing with the pound and kilogram: grams are usually too small to make a difference, and while Kg is useful, the pound is a finer unit to differentiate things by.
On the flip side, I prefer the kilometer because I can more easily visualize it in real life. A mile is harder to estimate by eye since the terrain is much more likely to be blocked or undulate.
I have to disagree. People are comfortable with 3 digit numbers. And in most cases we prefer not to use 1-digit numbers because it requires use of fractions or decimal points to achieve decent precision. It’s meaningless for me to say I’m 2 meters tall (rounded to the nearest meter). I could say I’m 1.74 meter tall, but it’s easier to say I’m 174 cm tall.
But if that were the case then there would probably be at least some people going around saying their 67 inches tall or whathaveyou instead of 5 foot 7.
Then again, do people in the British Isles who prefer traditional units for people’s weight go around saying “I weigh 9 stone and 5” or somesuch rather than simply 9 stone? I genuinely don’t know, and if they don’t then that would disprove my rebuttal.
A foot is a thing. A “ten inch” is not a thing unless it’s a record of a band that plays the blues, so dividing something into feet and inches is different conceptually from giving it as one big number.
It is the Kennedy Space CENTER, damn you Brits for misspelling English words!!!
But, to politely answer your question ( ) as an American, I could probably count on both hands the number of times I have used the unit “ton” in my life. Maybe when getting a truckload of gravel or buying a truck for its towing capacity.
Pounds, however, are used daily. I know how much I weigh, how much almost everything I buy in bulk weighs, get my deli items by the pound, checking the shipping weight of items, etc.
So, I would conceptualize pounds in that instance (e.g. Wow! That is X number of times that I weigh!!) more so than I would tons.
ETA: This reminds me of Cool Springs Park near Rowlesburg, WV. Probably the only place in the world where I can buy a soda, a pack of cigarettes, a hot dog, a bushel of apples, and a ton of chicken manure (my choice of three varieties) in a single transaction.
At work, we have just changed our distribution 3PL to a leading multinational German outfit.
We have thousands of cubic metres of product stored in their facilities, and the cost is a weekly rate per cubic metre, but for reasons known only to the Teutonic mind, all their inventory and warehouse activity reporting of volumes is in cubic centimetres.
Personally, the place where I notice this kind of thing most is in speeds for objects in space. For terrestrial speeds, I’m comfortable with either miles or kilometers per hour. Those numbers are virtually always less than 1000 – easy to comprehend one, two, or three digit numbers.
But I read a lot of astronomical literature where the preferred speed unit is Km/sec. When talking about the speeds of stars, planets, or spacecraft, that’s what I’m most comfortable with. And just like with terrestrial speeds, these numbers are usually less than 1000.
Then there’s newspaper popularizations about space or astronomy where they inevitably use the units millions of miles (or kilometers) per hour and I’m lost. I have no feel for those quantities.
sure, but when you get to speaking about the weight of, say, the Saturn V, would you not switch to thinking of it in x number of gravel loads instead? There feels to me to be a fuzzy threshold above which we need another benchmark unit (I could’ve said “yardstick” there but that would have been unnecessarily confusing)
)