Ugh. Where did 660 feet come from? Where did 66 feet come from? A line of potatoes (linear) to measure an acre (area)? A strip of land 43,560 x 1 ft is an acre requiring 87k+ potatoes.
660 feet is a furlong, which comes from one furrow length. It’s the distance two oxen can pull a plow (creating a furrow), without stopping to rest. Then the oxen and person standing atop the plow could have a little rest before turning around to plow the next furrow. Not sure how many furrows but if you repeat this process all day, you’ll have plowed an acre. Potatoes did not exist to farmers when this land measurement was in use. But 66 x 660 is the original definition of an acre, and the only reasonable explanation for why we have 43,560
In California we measure water in Acre Feet. I guess if you know how many acres you have, and how many inches of water your crops need, I guess you’ll know how many acre feet you need.
It is a chain (66ft) and 10 chains 660ft. They are historically important units for land surveying (and relevant today because of that). The measurement is nonsense, but the graph makes sense because an acre can be defined as 1 chain by 10 chains or 66ftx660ft=4356sqft
These numbers all come from people who preferred 12 and 60 as their working base numbers, not 10. A lot of it becomes really elegant once you understand that.
You can divide 2400 square feet into an acre 18 times, but yeah... like, in most metros, even the kind of small detached single-family home you'd find in a inner-ring suburb is going to sit on a 5,000-8,000 square foot lot. Typical suburban lot sizes are more like a 1/4 acre.
This isn't to say that a McMansion on a quarter acre of land is a good thing, but just as a point of reference, if you're imagining a neighborhood of 15 to 20 homes and somebody tells you "that's about an acre" you're going to be off by an order of magnitude.
18*2,400=43,200, so they’d fit, but not nicely. It also doesn’t take external wall width into account, but that’s 20 extra feet per house for the outside walls.
That said, at least in my area, most of the houses in that size range are two story, so who knows what the footprint would be. Agreed, unhelpful metric.
I live in a home that size.... any time someone comes over they mention how big the house is. It feels huge, we moved from 985 sqft and a year later it still feels enormous. To think this is the average is a mind fuck LoL.
Homes here tend to be about that size unless they're older than about 1980. We also have a lot of absolutely massive mansions built out in the middle of absolutely nowhere that'll drive that number up quite a bit. If you're willing to drive 30 minutes to the grocery, you can get a 5000+sqft house for well under $500k. I have a buddy who just bought a 5200sqft place on 8 acres for about $450k. If you really want to live somewhere undesirable like the place my parents moved to a few years ago, their whole subdivision has a few dozen houses all over 7000sqft, and they sold for about $400k
Meanwhile, Europeans use hectares. Or a hundred ares. An are is 100 square metres, so a hectare is 100*100 or 10000 square metres or 1/100 of a square kilometer.
Mine is divided by street frontage due to natural environmental features, but I know how to round numbers, so I have
0.7 acres, and that means I can round to 3/4 acres.
I thought acre was English for the Spanish word "hectárea". I guess I was wrong. Anyways, my mind always goes blank when people use these units. I can only understand once I hear squared meters or kilometers.
Edit: dude, an hectare is just 10k squared meters. Chef's kiss. Meanwhile an acre is 4 neighboring houses from that Lemmy's user, or 5000 potatoes spread on a field.
Yknow how hard it is to think in your second language? It's the same here. I know metric how metric works perfectly well, but I convert to imperial to think, and then convert the answer back to metric for whatever person needed it in metric. I literally have all the conversions memorized but I just can't think in metric. I say this because of the way you presented 10k square meters. Had to convert to miles to visualize and then was like "oh, a 16th of a mile squared"
Someone already pointed out the IKEA parking lot sizes, but just for further reference the IKEA by me has a parking lot between 6 and 7 acres haha. Bless the US. That is a very large parking lot even here but there are several other parking lots around similar in size.
For those of us that regularly plow large tracts of land using manual tools, this is an extremely useful unit. Anyways, if that isn't a usual activity for you, an acre is an area of 10 square chains, or roughly an area 1 mile long and 8 feet wide.
Nah you'd either overestimate because you're not starving and disfigured from the knights from the neighbouring manor maiming you for fun, or you'd underestimate because no one is whipping you and threatening to kill your children if you don't meet your quota.
The problem with "1% of the forest where Winnie the Poo lived" is that a) nobody really knows how large that forest actually is, and b) that the real forest of those stories is actually called "1000 acre wood".
You never heard the term "back 40"? 160 acres is a quarter section. A section is a mile by a mile, 640 acres. 1/640 of a square mile. Roughly 8 feet wide and a mile long.
8' x 1 mile works, but the way it would usually be subdivided is to be a 16th section - or 1/4 of 1/4. Like a 16-light window. 2 x 2 furlongs, or a quarter-mile by quarter-mile.
Is 200 ft by 200 ft equal to one acre? A piece of land that measures 200 ft by 200 ft is the equivalent of 40,000 square feet. One acre contains 43,560 square feet, making the 200 x 200 ft land equal to approximately 0.918 acres.
Gee, if only someone would come up with a system that properly ordered scales of measurement in a logical and sensible way...
Yeah it looks stupid when you do it like that, almost the same thing as if I told you there was 3,280 feet in a kilometer. Feet are not the base unit here, the mile is.
How many acres are in a mile by a mile? 1 Square Mile = 640 Acres. There are 640 acres in a square mile, because an acre is defined as an area of 66 feet to 660 feet and equals to 66 * 660 = 43560 square feet and one mile is 5280 feet and one sq.
Why don't meters go into light years or parsecs nicely?
Anyways, an acre is the area people would plow by ox in one day. You measured fields by the acre because in a medieval society that said something really interesting about how many farm workers you needed for a given area.
Similarly, a mile comes from the Latin for 'thousand paces', which is a fairly natural way for people on foot to measure distances.
Much like how light year says something scientifically interesting about distances to stars so we use it instead of petameters or zettameters in astronomy, people used acres and miles despite them not going into feet well.
It works because you generally don't convert between light years and meters, or acres and feet. They mostly just exist at different scales.
The acre was used to subdivide up square miles. It makes more sense if you know 43,650 = 660 * 66. Also, 660 feet is exactly 1/8 of a mile. So once a square mile had been surveyed, you could split each side in half to get 4 squares of 160 acres. You could then split each of those again to get 40 acres (hence the "40 acres and a mule"), and then you could split them again to get 10-acre squares. Then you could split them into 5-acre rectangles, etc. The rectangles are good at keeping access to an existing road, although the skinniness isn't great. And all of these sub-divisions could live on the same grid.