[MUD-Dev] Metric vs. English System of Measurement in Games

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 12:02:32PM -0200 I heard the voice of
Julio Nobrega, and lo! it spake thus:

> Speaking as a player... I live in Brazil, where we use the metric
> system, and the "miles/yards" system is completely bogus for me.
> [...]  Everytime it goes from 0.6 mi to 845 yds or numbers like
> that my mind made a "glitch". How come a measure can go from close
> to half of something to 800 out of nowhere? :)

Speaking as somebody who lives in SI units and has an awful hard
time visualizing in meters or kilograms, *MY* mind glitches on that.
I find myself saying, "Well, 845 is a about halfway between 800 and
900, so yards to feet that's halfway between 2400 and 2700, so
around half a mile, a little less I guess, especially since I
rounded up, and..."  by which time the grue has eaten me. 8-}
However, I think a similar transition from ".5km" to "473m" is at
least as much of a throwoff; there's just less calculating after you
figure out what happened.

The problem there is less the units used, than the threshold for
swapping units.  Just to pull a number out of thin air, I'd probably
switch from at .1 mile (and maybe directly to feet, skipping yards),
because that's a sufficiently small fraction of a mile that dividing
it further is hard, and a sufficiently small number of feet/yards
that it doesn't strain me to visualize it.  Or, alternately, keep
with feet/yards up to 1 mile, and then swap.  .6 is a bizarre place
to cut over...


--
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.
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