Unit Confusion: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Many times when a measurement is given, the units of measurement don't make sense for what is being measured. This is especially annoying when the character suffering from '''Unit Confusion''' is supposed to be a scientific genius.

* In ''[[Bleach]]'', Ryuken tells his injured son that if he yell 5 Hertz louder he'll reopen his wounds (basically telling him to shut up), but Hertz is a measure of frequency (high or low) not intensity (decibels in the case of sound). But then Ishida ''is'' kind of a [[Glass Cannon]], [[Pun|so to speak]], and the area around a wound may have a [[Glass-Shattering Sound|resonant frequency]] that [[Hand Wave|he almost hit]].

 

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131207091312/http://www.politedissent.com/index.php?s=pico&submit=search This] ''Invincible Iron Man'' panel gets the unit type right but ''royally'' screws up the SI prefix: a "picobyte" would be one ''trillionth of a byte''. Must be ''really'' optimized code. Osborn probably meant to say "petabyte" or 2^50 bytes.

* In the Dutch comic ''Heinz'', the eponymous character asks what a light-year is, and the specialist responds that it is a year in which everything goes off without a hitch. This might be more of a malapropism, though.

* In ''The Truth about Pyecraft'' by [[H. G. Wells]], a fat man called Pyecraft persuades the Narrator (who has some magical recipes from his great-grandmother) to give him a potion to let him lose weight. Unfortunately, while Pyecraft ''does'' lose Weight, he doesn't lose ''Mass'', and ends up floating near the ceiling.

* ''[[Earth (The Book)]]'' ends with a survey for the reader to full out as an "Application for Genetic Reconstitution by Aliens." One of the questions is "How many kilowatts would you say your brain produces hourly?"

 

== Live Action TV ==

* The [[Chris de Burgh]] song "A Spaceman Came Traveling" (a sci-fi interpretation of the first Christmas) explicitly refers to "light-years of time"; the writer not only makes the mistake but goes out of his way to wave it in the listener's face.

* Joan Baez also made the light-years mistake in "Diamonds & Rust".

 

== Radio ==

* Averted in ''[[Zero Wing]]'', of all things, which correctly puts A.D. before the number.

 

* Early ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' strips have a nasty habit of referring to "watts of energy." Even as late as the third book, while it gets right that terawatt-nanoseconds would be a unit of energy (one more commonly known as the "kilojoule"), it treats it as though nanoseconds make it more incomprehensibly huge than "terawatt-hours" or, say, "terawatt-millennia."

** Implicitly, "[http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/195.htm terawatt-femtosecond]" and "watt-millisecond" both are 1 millijoule, but are not quite interchangeable, as they are used in very different contexts - much the same way as you'd give a look to someone talking about a power station in terms of "1 kiloton [TNT] equivalent" instead of "1.16 million kilowatt-hours", even though both mean "4.184 terajoules".

** The length of chakrym (as used in XX century) is variable, because it measures ''time'' of travel, rather than distance. Which is what actually mattered for trade or military purpose, but makes it unusable for map purpose, since not only its length depends on the given terrain, but can be even anisotropic if the surface is not level (i.e. if A is downhill from B, you can have a road from A to B of 5 chakrym, but the same road from B to A only 4). The parasang works the same way: [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_RO5tAAAAMAAJ Zayn al-Abidin Maraghahi] (who was raised close to Europe) complained that Persian "can't even measure distance", as both long and short road may take "one parasang".

** That's one of the reasons why until Lev Gumilev who knew about chakrym participated, no one could pinpoint the exact location of Khazaria despite many references. Say, there's a letter from Khazarian Kagan Joseph to Hasdai ibn Shafrut with distances from his capital city Itil to the borders: 20 parasangs to the East is Caspian Sea, 30 and 20 to North and South are rivers (the names of which were not readily identifiable). Looks easy — we only need to cut a triangle and see where it fits on the map, and even if the value of parasang changed a bit, we'll be close, right? Well, no. This would place a big city in the middle of nowhere, rather than on the Volga, where it was known to be. One, the parasang as "learned" by Europeans is the average value for Iranian plateau, but in the flat Steppes it's of course longer. Two, the inner sea's level was much lower (it was known to raise shortly before the Khazaria's end, then more, then drop a bit). Which places Itil in the delta of Volga as it was back then, and now under water and alluvium.

* [//www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI9w8g4UT2I This video] shows more examples of units with the same names but different values (e.g. short tons vs. long tons, statute miles vs. nautical miles vs. imperial nautical miles, etc.).