Comment on xkcd #3065: Square Units
waz@feddit.uk 3 weeks agoSo TIL. I have never heard of this, and I’m not sure if this happens in the U.K… I had always assumed, growing up with feet and inches and metres interchangeably, that area is always stated as the length of the side squared is how it is done. Has this happened as a mis-advertising tactic to make things sound bigger than they are?
Donjuanme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think square feet is popular because many things dealt with aren’t squares, but a square foot is generally small enough to be a good measure, while also large enough to not be an unreasonably large number. When square feet are too small we move to yards (meters), acres, hectares or miles.
A house or apartment isn’t usually square, so how would you apply feet (or meters) squared to it? While a property line might well be equally long on each edge, so you might see it in feet squared, but also that number looks A LOT smaller, so you’ll often see square feet or meters
waz@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I was briefly fascinated by ‘chains’ at school, in the system of rods, links and chains. The idea of chains was you go around the outside of an irregular area and the number of chains related to the area in acres. 1 acre to 10 square chains?