The more you know! doo doo doo... doo!🌈⭐
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.
Also, 18 homes wont fit on an acre.
This graphic is fucking awful.
An acre is not just a unit of area measurement but has a traditional shape or aspect ratio per acre, based on the land plots it was used for.
1 acre is traditionally 60 ft x 660 ft, also known as 1 chain by 1 furlong.
It's similar to if you said you could lay X potatoes across a football field. Yes a football field is an area but it also has a defined length.
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
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.
^average SIZED homes
Probably, as long as they have absolutely no yards, and no way to get to the front door.
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.
JFC not a single magnitude in metric...
The average American home is 2400 sqft?
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.
Where's that stat from? Is that legit?
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
I am more amazed they fit 18 of them on one acre.
Really shines a light on to how we could have plenty of housing for everyone if we didn't expect back yards.
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.
Thanks I hate it
I live in a neighborhood that is all half acre lots. So an acre is two properties on my street. Easy!
I have a 3/4 acre lot. So it's like my yard and the part of my neighbor's yard I can see. Easy
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.
How to increase property value in 2 easy steps.
The acre was defined officially as being 1 furlong (40 poles = 660 feet) in length, and 4 poles (66 feet) in breadth.
From the source of the problem.
Whip out your furlongs and poles. Bring some rods and chains, just in case.
Yea but if it's cold my pole is shorter
There was shrinkage!
I remember it just as 1x10 chains which is still esoteric and just to check the math on the conversion factor of 1 acre = 43,560 sq. ft.
Grab a couple of oxen and a plough, and plough all day long. The amount you've done is about an acre
Is it called that because you'd be all acky after all that hard work? An ache'er?
Never thought of this but I love it haha
but what if my couple of oxen is faster than yours?
Then you didn't plow as well, I guess?
I can visualize an acre really well.where I grew up, houses were standard on 1/4 acre blocks so it was just my house and my 3 neighbours houses.
Hectares though, these are the devils unit of area and Ill have no part in them!
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"
It's an imperial unit based on foot, so there's why. (4840 square feet, wtf)
Close, it's 4840 square yards not square feet,.
dict.cc lied to me!
It's 4046m2 or 63m per side.
A bit bigger than 1/2 standard football pitch, (soccer field) - 7120m2 A bit smaller than American football field - 5350m2
I think the parking lot is pretty accurate when you think of a big parking, for example at IKEA.
what's that in barleycorns?
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.
If American, use sports related analogies. About 2/3 of a football field.
Actually it's pretty much exactly the main play area of a football field, minus 5 yards on either side, or 10 yards on one side(acre in red, association football field in blue): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AAcre_superimposed_over_football_fields.svg
The unit apparently represents the approximate area of land that one person with a team of oxen could plow in a single day.
Funny enough "about 2/3 the size of a football field" works about as well for places that use that word for soccer too
A FIFA standard field is 1.764 acres (off by 17.6%) and an NFL standard field is 1.322 (off by 11.9%)
Came here for this. The whole field is ~1 1/3 acres, so if you think of the whole field as 4, 1/3 acre sections, an acre is ~ 3/4 of a football field.
Unless it comes from space. Then it's measures in Texas sizes.
MCRN?
I'm pretty sure an acre was originally defined as the area of land that a medieval peasant could plow in one day.
There. I'm glad that's all cleared up.
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.
just plow a field and find out, it's simple really.
I've been milkin' and plowin' so long
Even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone
Fool!
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.
Having spent a good part of my life in the countryside, that's actually helpful
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.
Uhhh yeah, thanks. That really helped
Sigh. 2.15 metres by 1.6 kilometers.
43,560 square feet = one acre.
The square root of 43,560 is 208.71 feet
208.71 feet/ 2.5 feet per step for men = 84 steps.
So walk 84 steps then turn a right angle and walk another 84. One acre is the area contained in that square.
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.
No shit. Read what I wrote again.
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".
The chores!
The stores!
Fresh air!
Times Square!
You reached back to my childhood of irresponsible amounts of television at all hours, and you brought me joy. Thank you!
It's equal to 4,840 square yards, or 4,046 square meters.
It's about holds my hands up this wide by holds my hands a little further apart this long, if you picture that being in yards.
Not to scale
Unless you're Elastigirl
About 4000 square meters.
It's 1/640th of a square mile
in europe we have a and hekta, a is 10m^2 and hekta 100m^2 and km^2 which is 1000m^2 ofc
without brackets this is misleading:
a = (10m)² = 100m²
ha = (100m)² = 10,000m²
km² = (1000m)² = 1,000,000m²
Also in Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica
what does any of this mean and omg it's vastly superior to ours.
/American
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...
Gee, if only someone would come up with a system that properly ordered scales of measurement in a logical and sensible way…
No use, even if somebody come up with such a system, adoption of such would be impossible due to "this is the way we always did it"
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.
Asked Google again. Is this it?
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.
Because it isn't really helping it either.
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.
It's about a 200x200 foot square (bit larger but that's close enough)
