History Main / UnitConfusion

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** In a rather literal meta-example of this trope, there was much confusion over the definition of the term "unit" from ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'' (when the Kamino cloners said that 200,000 units were ready and a million more well on the way). Many assumed it referred to a military unit (e.g. an entire battalion of troopers) and failed to notice when Creator/RASalvatore's {{novelization}} (and Patricia C. Wrede's Junior novelization) stated it to refer to [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale an individual clone]]. (They later [[FlameWar took issue]] with Creator/KarenTraviss' ''Literature/RepublicCommandoSeries'', [[MisBlamed misattributing the problem to her]].) In context, "unit" meant a unit of product. After the Disney reboot, ''Complete Locations'' would continue this.

--> Sergeant instructs the recruits: ''And water boils at 90 degrees!''
--> One recruit replies: ''Sir, the water boils at 100 degrees!''
--> The sergeant isn't amused and orders 20 push-ups. He goes to the office and checks out the book.
--> He returns and says: ''Recruit, you are right! Water indeed does boil at 100 degrees. 90 degrees is a straight angle!''

%%* Music/JoanBaez also made the light-years mistake in "Diamonds & Rust".

--> '''Ramírez:''' The temperature is 27 Celsius degrees, 80 Farenheit degrees.\\

%%* ''Luke Surl'' [[http://www.lukesurl.com/archives/1607 shows]] a confusion of angle units [[ExpositionDiagram on a chart]].
%%* ''Webcomic/SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal'' shows [[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=330 self-explaining one]].

* ''Series/AreYouSmarterThanAFifthGrader'': In one episode, one of the quiz questions was "How many watts are used during one kilowatt hour?" (The answer given was 1,000, but the question as written is unanswerable since one kilowatt-hour can result from using 2000 watts over a half-hour period, 500 watts over a two-hour period, or any of an infinity of other possible combinations.)

** In the episode where Bart goes to a gifted school, the kids con him out of his lunch by using units like picolitres to make it sound like they were offering more than they were.

* The UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum game ''Road Race'' betrays its roots as a lazy port of the UsefulNotes/{{MSX}} ''Hyper Rally'' with its speedometer, swapped from km/h to mph with no attempt to recalculate and leaving the 374 mph top speed feeling very sluggish indeed.

* For many years, computer memory units used prefixes that looked like SI prefixes, but were subtly different. The Kilobyte was 1024 bytes, for example. This all went horribly wrong one day when an enterprising Marketer realised they could sell harddrives with storage capacities measured in megabytes... but using the SI meaning of mega (10[-[[superscript:6]]-]), not the computer engineering meaning of mega (2[-[[superscript:20]]-]). Result? Sell smaller drives, but claim the same size, thus undercutting competitors who spent more to make bigger drives because so many consumers didn't stop to check the difference. As a result of all this, a so-called "1.44 MB" floppy disk is neither 1.44 binary megabytes nor 1.44 decimal megabytes, but ''1.44 thousand binary kilobytes''. There are now new standard prefixes like 'kibi' and 'mebi' (short for kilo-binary and mega-binary, respectively) to mean 1024 and 1048576 respectively, but they've so far failed to be embraced by the hardware and software community outside of hard drive manufacturers (with the exception of [[UsefulNotes/{{UNIX}} Linux]], which ''does'' use the binary units and prefixes). Plenty of consumers notice the difference when they buy a new laptop, and return it to the store complaining they've been short changed because they were sold a machine with a 720 gigabyte drive but they're only seeing 670 (because it's 720×1000×1000×1000 bytes according to the marketers, but divided down in 1024s by the OS).

** In a rather literal meta-example of this trope, there was much confusion over the definition of the term "unit" from ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'' (when the Kamino cloners said that 200,000 units were ready and a million more well on the way). Many assumed it referred to a military unit (e.g. an entire battalion of troopers) and failed to notice when Creator/RASalvatore's {{novelization}} (and Patricia C. Wrede's Junior novelization) stated it to refer to [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale an individual clone]]. (They later [[FlameWar took issue]] with Creator/KarenTraviss' ''Literature/RepublicCommandoSeries'', [[MisBlamed misattributing the problem to her]].) In context, "unit" meant used a unit of product. After the Disney reboot, ''Complete Locations'' would continue this.

* ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'' makes the Hertz/decibels mistake in an episode centered around Marill. This is especially egregious as the person making the mistake is supposedly an expert on this sort of thing; yet Marill had previously appeared in the series without the error being made.

* ''Literature/Aeon14'': ''Race Across Spacetime'' once describes a relatively nearby object's position as a hundred thousand light-years away (roughly the diameter of the Milky Way). M.D. Cooper says this was a typo: [[UnitConfusion she mistakenly wrote "light-years" instead of "kilometers"]] and her editor didn't catch it.

* Quite a bit of old Russian literature can be confusing to the modern reader due to the once popularity of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Réaumur_scale Réaumur scale]] there (water freezing at 0 and boiling at 80). It's simple enough to convert to Celsius; just multiply by four-fifths.

->'''Pearl:''' Y'all couldn't touch the Pearl if you trained for 100 million light-years!
->'''Marina:''' Light-years are a unit of distance...

* Creator/MarionZimmerBradley's ''Literature/{{Darkover}}'': In the original version of ''The Bloody Sun'', the protagonist is told that his matrix jewel can probably emit "only a few grams of energy." It ''could'' make sense since [[UsefulNotes/{{Relativity}} mass and energy are equivalent]] (''E''=''mc''[-[[superscript:2]]-]). But the speed of light is so large (300 megametres per second) that even a few grams of mass, converted to energy, would be tremendous. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima released as much energy as about 15 thousand tons of TNT ... by converting less than ''one'' gram of mass into energy.

* In ''Literature/EncyclopediaBrown'''s defense, one story referenced this trope in its solution: a man claiming to be a sailor is [[ConvictionByContradiction revealed as a fraud]] because (among other mistakes) he refers to speed in terms of "knots per hour", when a knot is ''already'' a measure of time over distance, i.e. one nautical mile per hour.
* NeverTrustATrailer: The inside flaps of the dust jacket of ''Literature/{{Eon}}'' by Creator/GregBear has the protagonists going a million "kilometers" into the future. In units used by nuclear and particle physicists (the speed of light is one, a pure number, making one second equal to 300,000 kilometres) this corresponds to going 3.3 seconds into the future, a time even TheSlowPath reaches rather quickly. Fortunately, the book refers to a million kilometres in a completely different manner.
* An in-Universe example in the first book of the ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' series concerns the unfortunate fate of the combined battlefleets of the Vl'hurgs and G'Gugvunts, sent out to annihilate humanity after it is discovered exactly who it was who started the terrible war between them. Unfortunately, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the thousands of horribly beweaponed warships were swallowed by a small dog.
* A children's book called ''I'm Coming To Get You'' told the story from the perspective of a monster travelling across space wreaking havoc, all the while getting closer to Earth in order to "get" a small child. When the monster finally arrives it realises it horribly misjudged its own size and the child is actually much bigger than it and easily chases it away.
* Used in Robert Asprin's ''Literature/MythAdventures'' series; as a dimension-traveler stranded in a backwards world, Aahz has trouble with Klahdish units of time and often has to be corrected by his apprentice Skeeve. In one book Aahz hears someone coming and says they'll cross paths in a few seconds. When he sees Skeeve panic, he realizes that he messed up and, after hashing things out, amends his statement to a few ''minutes''.
* ''Literature/PerryRhodan'' plays with, then in-setting justifies the "temperatures below absolute zero" version: in the first arc in which humanity and allies seriously and consciously have to fight off the self-styled forces of cosmic chaos, one of the latter's weapons is a phenomenon that does indeed cause objects caught in it to rapidly cool down to absolute zero and below... whereupon they simply ''vanish'' from a universe in which they can no longer exist. In reality, they end up getting displaced into another universe whose own 'absolute zero' is in fact several hundred kelvins below that of ours, a fact that is discovered once actual survivors of the whole process start to [[CameBackWrong come back]]…
* In the short story ''Retrograde Summer'', Creator/JohnVarley [[SubvertedTrope managed]] to use "light year" as a time span. On Mercury, a (solar) day lasts two local years, so you have a light year (when the sun is up), followed by a dark year (sun below the horizon)...
* In ''Literature/TheScrewtapeLetters'' Screwtape uses "light-year" as a measurement of time.
* In ''The Truth about Pyecraft'' by Creator/HGWells, 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. Unfortuantely, while Pyecraft ''does'' lose weight, he doesn't lose ''mass'', and ends up floating near the ceiling. More, the protagonist calls out Pyecraft's euphemism, pointing out his trouble is a result of saying he wanted to lose ''weight'', when what he really wanted to lose was ''fat''.

*** There's also a throwaway line in ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'' where Padmé says "Geonosis is less than a parsec away", which might be a subtle attempt to rectify the earlier confusion.

** The most famous example of all: Han Solo bragging in ''Film/ANewHope'' that his ship can make the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs". Parsecs are a unit of distance, not time. While this has been {{Retcon}}ned to death with constantly shifting backstories about skilled pilots shaving distance by flying close to black holes, even those omit that the parallax second is based on local (terrestrial) factors, specifically the radius of the Earth's orbit, [[OrphanedEtymology and would have no meaning in "a galaxy far, far away"]]. [[JustifiedTrope The script (especially earlier drafts) says that this bit of dialog was intentional and meant to paint Han as a blowhard]], and if you watch the scene closely, Ben kind of rolls his eyes, seeing through Han's BS.

*** Picard is described at some point as being about two meters tall, which would put him at around 6'5. Patrick Stewart is 5'10, so it's clear that the writers got yards and meters mixed up.

* ''VideoGame/OutRun 2019'', depending on the regional version. In the Japanese version, your top speed in manual transmission (which gives a slightly higher top speed than automatic) is 341 kilometers per hour. While perhaps the most realistic speed, you'd expect a rocket-powered car [[IWantMyJetpack in a 90's depiction of 2019]] to go much faster, especially since other racing games by Sega have you reaching that speed in far more realistic cars, like in ''VideoGame/VirtuaRacing'', ''VideoGame/DaytonaUSA'', and even other ''[=OutRun=]'' games where you're just driving a Ferrari (or a [[WritingAroundTrademarks copyright-friendly substitute]]). The North American version has your top speed at 692 miles per hour, which sounds cooler although you don't seem to be moving ''that'' fast (for reference, common passenger jet aircraft move at about 500 mph). The European version has perhaps the most plausible speeds, listing your top speed as 341 mph. But perhaps the most important issue is that ''none of these units convert correctly to one another'': 692 mph would convert to 1,113 km/h, 341 km/h would convert to 211 mph, and 341 mph would convert to 548 mph.

** In a rather literal meta-example of this trope, there was much confusion over the definition of the term "unit" from ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'' (when the Kamino cloners said that 200,000 units were ready and a million more well on the way). Many assumed it referred to a military unit (e.g. an entire battalion of troopers) and failed to notice when Creator/RASalvatore's {{novelization}} (and Patricia C. Wrede's Junior novelization) stated it to refer to [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale an individual clone]]. (They later [[FlameWar took issue]] with Creator/KarenTraviss' ''Literature/RepublicCommandoSeries'', [[MisBlamed misattributing the problem to her]].) In context, "unit" meant used a unit of product. After the Creator/{{Disney}} takeover and relegation of the novelization to ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'', a new canon reference book, ''Star Wars: Complete Locations'', made the more reasonable statement that "unit" was meant to refer to a full ''division'' of clones (conventionally ten to twenty thousand infantrymen or a couple hundred armored vehicles).

* Comedian [[http://drpetecomedy.com Dr. Pete Ludovice]] has a routine where he suggests that men try to invoke UnitConfusion by reporting their [[GagPenis penis size in nanometres]].

* The Metric system is an intentional [[AvertedTrope aversion]] of this trope. It was intended to become an international, independent and accurate system based on natural phenomena and constant, and be base-10, and be useful on both everyday use and for science. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]], since there were some 38 different pounds and 43 different size feet [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_French_Revolution in France alone]] - which were a constant source for UnitConfusion, chaos and [[ExploitedTrope outright fraud]]. Several buildings and bridges collapsed because the masters and builders from different towns and different provinces used their own domestic, different size, units in construction -- cue the case of the 17th century Swedish warship ''Wasa'' which is lengthwise asymmetric because of port side having been built by Swedish constructors using the Swedish feet (297 mm) while the starboard side having been built by Dutch constructors using the Dutch foot of 283 mm. To add an insult to injury, the Dutch foot consisted of ''eleven'' inches. This unit chaos originated in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and collapse of standard weighs and measures. Alas, every petty kingdom, statelet and town adopted their own weighs and measures to [[HonorBeforeReason emphasize their independence]]. Already Charlemagne had attempted to make some sense in this chaos, but the various realms clung jealously on their own weighs and measures and would not approve standardization. The various scientists of the Age Of Reason - Newton, Huygens, Bernoulli, Papin etc - worked for an international standard system for weighs and measures, and the work was ready in 1790. King Louis XVI approved the Metric system legal in France.

** There was an extreme level of luck involved in the flight having no fatalities. The captain happened to be a glider pilot (and thus knew about the unique requirements of powerless flight) and the first officer happened to be a former RCAF pilot who was stationed at RCAF Gimli, a nearby (decommissioned) airbase. The base had been converted into a race track and the pilots managed not to hit the drag races held on the runway they landed on, so [[EverybodyLives nobody got hurt]] both on plane and on the ground. Note that in later simulator re-creations of the circumstances with other flight crews, ''every one'' ended with a fatal crash.

* A more down-to-Earth example (no pun intended) was the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider Gimli Glider.]] The Boeing 767 C-GAUN was the first Air Canada jet with metric instrumentation. There already had to be a measurement conversion because the refueling people on the ground measured kerosene in volume (gallons), while the aircraft measured fuel in weight (pounds or kilograms). The ground crew used the wrong conversion factor in calculating how many gallons to pump on the plane, leading the crew to think the plane had 22,000 kilograms of fuel on board, the amount needed for the flight, when it only had 22,000 pounds (9979 kg). The exact mass of fuel used is very important to aircraft and thus the gauge could not be replaced with a car style unitless gauge. Nobody on the groundcrew or in the cockpit had been trained to do the proper conversion; this kind of thing used to be the job of the flight engineer, but computerized jets like the Boeing 767 have eliminated the need for that position, and apparently no one at Air Canada had stopped to consider who should take over the FE's duties.

** Under normal circumstances, the fuel gauges would detect the actual amount of fuel loaded and that would prevent the problem. However, the fuel gauges were broken on that particular plane, which they actually knew, but this was not considered a serious enough fault to ground the plane.[[note]]It actually ''should have'' resulted in the plane being grounded, as the plane's minimum equipment list (which specifies what items of equipment are allowed to be inoperative without rendering the plane unairworthy) required that at least one fuel gauge be functional in order to legally dispatch the plane, but a miscommunication in the airline's maintenance department led to the plane being okayed for flight despite the broken gauges.[[/note]] Without the gauges, the pilots depended on the FMC's calculated fuel weights to track fuel consumption during the flight, but because it had been given an incorrect starting weight, all its calculations were based on that and therefore also wrong.

** The units of ''energy'' (distance multiplied by force) and ''torque'' (distance multiplied by force), but they are different products. Energy is ''scalar product'' while torque is ''cross product'' (vector product). Thus while the unit of both are newtonmetre in SI system, the unit of energy has its own name, joule (J): 1 J = 1 Nm. The unit of torque is newtonmetre, but cross-product (N x m). When you lift a weight of one newton up one metre, it is energy of one joule; when you pivot a lever, length of one metre, by force of one newton, it is torque of one newtonmetre).

* For many years, computer memory units used prefixes that looked like SI prefixes, but were subtly different. The Kilobyte was 1024 bytes, for example. This all went horribly wrong one day when an enterprising Marketer realised they could sell harddrives with storage capacities measured in megabytes... but using the SI meaning of mega (10[-[[superscript:6]]-]), not the computer engineering meaning of mega (2[-[[superscript:20]]-]). Result? Sell smaller drives, but claim the same size, thus undercutting competitors who spent more to make bigger drives because so many consumers didn't stop to check the difference. As a result of all this, a so-called "1.44 MB" floppy disk is neither 1.44 binary megabytes nor 1.44 decimal megabytes, but ''1.44 thousand binary kilobytes''. There are now new standard prefixes like 'kibi' and 'mebi' (short for kilo-binary and mega-binary, respectively) to mean 1024 and 1048576 respectively, but they've so far failed to be embraced by the hardware and software community outside of hard drive manufacturers (with the exception of [[UsefulNotes/{{UNIX}} Linux]], which ''does'' use the binary units and prefixes). Plenty of consumers notice the difference when they buy a new laptop, and return it to the store complaining they've been short changed because they were sold a machine with a 720 gigabyte drive but they're only seeing 670 (because it's 720 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 bytes according to the marketers, but divided down in 1024s by the OS).

** Also, in one episode, Sheldon argues with the Department of Motor Vehicles over their use of the term "Car length" in one of their tests questions, citing that "A car length is not a standardised unit of measure" and he has a point as different makes of car are different lengths

* ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'': In [[Recap/StevenUniverseS2E13ChilleTid "Chille Tid"]], an exhausted Pearl at one point mistakenly says they've been "searching for light-years" for [[spoiler:Malachite/Lapis Lazuli and Jasper]]. Amethyst sort of corrects her by replying "light-years measure light, not years".

* Precious metals are measured in troy pounds (373 g), which are divided into 12 troy ounces (31 g) -- standard ("avoirdupois") pounds (454 g) are divided into 16 ounces (28 g). (Hence, an ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers, but a pound of gold weighs less than an pound of feathers.)

** Another time, Jason decided to take up baking, and mused over whether the 350 degrees he had to set the oven at were in Celsius, Fahrenheit, or kelvins.[[note]]For the record, 350 degrees Fahrenheit is a moderate oven temperature, 350 degrees Celsius is much higher than most ovens can go, and 350 kelvins isn't even hot enough to boil water.[[/note]] Peter sarcastically suggested that he rotate the oven almost a full circle. [[DontBeRidiculous "Don't be silly, Peter."]]

*** "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS2E12TheRoyale The Royale]]" listed a planet's surface as being -291°C. Not only is it below absolute zero (-273.15°C), but it's really, ''really'' unlikely to occur naturally on a planet, thanks to the physics explained in SpaceIsCold. This was due to someone deciding to swap out the word [[TheMetricSystemIsHereToStay "Fahrenheit" with "Celsius" at the last minute]] [[CriticalResearchFailure not bothering to actually covert the Fahrenheit temperature to the Celsius scale]] (-291°F would be -179.4°C, still exceptionally cold but at least physically possible).

* Happens in universe in an ''Website/SCPFoundation'' story. There is a big difference between mA and MA. Exactly how he managed to set the circuit to nine orders of magnitude lower than normal isn't given.

* Happens in universe in an ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' story. There is a big difference between mA and MA. Exactly how he managed to set the circuit to nine orders of magnitude lower than normal isn't given.

* In ''Webcomic/GirlGenius'', a veteran airman breaks out an old mnemonic when his airship is attacked by a swarm of fiery robots: "[[http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20080801 If you'd live to end of day, from Mechanicsburg two leagues stay.]]" The helmsman demands to know ''whose'' leagues, and what that works out to in kilometers to which the airman replies he has no idea as everyone gave it a berth wider than two of ''anyone's'' leagues. As it happens, the robots' master specifies they should chase their target for ten kilometers, which is near enough to 2 English leagues, or 6 miles.