By Dan Miller
June 20, 2008
I'm on vacation, doing as little as humanly possible, so here's a "rerun" of an essay I wrote more than 3 years ago.
How would guys like me measure anything if it weren't for football fields?
If someone asks me about the acreage of a particular piece of property, I confess.... I have no idea.... but I can give you a pretty good idea of how many football fields would fit on that land.
It's then up to somebody else, with a knack for math, to convert the yardage to feet, or meters, or whatever.
The trick is to visualize the yard lines on the gridiron.... and it works equally as well indoors or out.
While visiting a farm recently, my wife asked me to estimate the distance to a stream behind the farm house.
I visualized goal posts at the other end, and said, "Oh, it's about one-and-a-half football fields.
I then paced it off.... and I was pretty darned close.
My wife, on the other hand, is more likely to describe something as "about half the size of the Target parking lot."
She's pretty good at that.
But for many men like me, if it weren't for those imaginary football yard markers ingrained in our brains, judging distances would be a lost art.
Interestingly, I was reading a book the other day about the Great Pyramid in Egypt, and the official description of the structure pointed out that the base would cover 10 football fields.
Probably written by a man.
Of course, the ancient Egyptians likely described those structures as "covering 5 chariot race tracks," or "25 tug of war courts," or whatever they played back then.
Truthfully, I'm exaggerating a bit. I'm well aware of the more scientific and accurate ways of measuring distances.
For example, I'll be walking out to the car in just a few minutes, and I know -- once I get out the door -- the distance from the back door to my parked car is almost exactly the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate.
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