How many London buses make an American Football field?

If you don't read the splendid Friendly Ghost blog (and if not why not?) you'll have missed FG's discovery today of a wonderfully useful journalist's tool that converts raw numerical measurements into examples that people can readily envisage. What - asks FG - is 348 metres in terms the man on the Clapham Omnibus can understand? Chrico has a tool - the Double Decker Bus Calculator - that tells us it's about 46 double-decker buses (or 17 cricket pitches, 12 blue whales or 0.000052 of the length of the river Nile). Where it comes in really useful, though, is in offering visual images for multiple cultural reference points - it turns out that 348 metres is also approximately 3 American Football fields. The good bit is that online, writers don't even need to make their own guess as to what frame of reference readers will be most comfortable using to understand what 348 metres really means - they can just offer a tool like this and let each reader make their own choice.

Comments

[awrc]

http://www.wired.com/culture/education/magazine/15-09/st_units

[Katlin]

What a wonderful entry! As an American Anglophile and a die-hard fan of American football, I've always wondered how many double-decker buses would fit within a football field. Thank you!