Conversion fun

[flick]

I'm re-reading the Riverworld books, and occasionally giggling.

It looks like they were (being American) written in Imperial measurements, and then someone came along and said "shouldn't all these people speaking Esperanto in the Future be using metric?", so he went back and did some laborious conversions....

The bamboo was 31m, or over 100 feet, high.
One man stood about 5.08cm, or 2 inches, shorter than another.

And, of course, the grails themselves: “a grey metal cylinder, 45.72 centimeters across, 76.20 centimeters high, weighing empty about 0.55 kilogram.”

Comments

[sixbeforelunch]

(Here via andrewducker.)

My favorite is all of the writers who think that two meters is the same thing as six feet. And given the propensity for having heroes be six feet tall, you've got all these sci fi protagonists running around who are two meters tall, and I always get thrown out of the story thinking about how they must be uncomfortable on cramped spaceships.

[momentsmusicaux]

Oh dear. Context is important in translation!

[calimac]

I get very tired of people who think that, in our metric future, we'll have to say "A miss is as good as 1.6 kilometers."

It works the other way too.

[original_aj]

My copy of the Skyrealms of Jorune RPG has suffered from this.

It has a magic system based around spheres, so the diameter of the sphere is frequently referred to. It looks like the units used when it was originally written were metric, and at a late stage it was decided to change to imperial by automatically replacing every instance of "meter" with "yard". Consequently there are constant references to spheres having "diayards".

Re: It works the other way too.

[flick]

That reminds me of an-almost-certainly-untrue-but-too-good-not-to-remember story of a UK author whose book was American-ised by his US publiser. One of the changes was autoreplace of 'flat' to 'apartment', which caused lines such as '"Of course we can't do that!" he replied apartmently'....