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.
I’m no expert but i believe that’s not how the term is used today. Like if a house is advertised as coming on a quarter acre of land, that says absolutely nothing about the dimensions of that land
True, I was just explaining where those numbers came from.
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.
660 * 8 is also 5280, or one mile.
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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.
You struggled with word problems in algebra classes didnt you?
Most 2000sf+ homes, even in rural areas, are 2+ stories. That would leave room for yards. Not big yards, but yards.
My 750sf circa-1960 starter home in a turn-of-century streetcar suburb sits on a 7,500sf lot, and that’s relatively small for the area. You’d have to be talking about urban rowhouses as seen in East Coast cities to approach anything like a 2500sf lot size for a single family home.
^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.
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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
Probably being driven up by the huge number of McMansions in the US, plus most of the ‘smaller’ places are apartments/condos, so wouldn’t be counted.
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The median is 2,273 sqft (oddly specific lol) as of 2021. In case anyone else is curious lol.
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
Guys, I actually came here to learn something!
CADmonkey, DemBoSain, and HjFun are correct in this case. 43,560 sq. ft., or 4046.86 sq. meters.
Coffeebiscuit presumably dropped a zero accidentally.
0 here it is!
You stole it!
0 i found another one! Here ya go!
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.
What the fuck’s a furlong???
edit: Google says it’s 1/8 of a mile… 201.17m for my SI people.
One of the base units of the superior velocity measurement, furlongs per fortnight.
1/8th of a mile per 14 days…
I don’t know if I should kiss you or kill you for this knowledge.
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.
A Hectare is just 100m X 100m. So about two football pitches next to each other.
(A metre is about the same as a yard).
Witch!
Burn her!
Is that a UK football pitch or an American football pitch?
Also – fun fact – football pitches (UK/European) vary in size depending on how “professional” they are
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?
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!
I get what you mean, but something about the word close bothers me when they were missing 88.8% of the area.
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One hundred square feet is ten feet by ten feet on a side. Now, change each side to ten yards by ten yards. That means each side is thirty feet long. Thirty feet times thirty feet is nine hundred square feet.
3x3. They counted 1x1. 1/9. 8/9 is .8888
Easy math on divde by 9 1/9. .1111111 2/9 .222222 3/9 .333333 All the way to 9/9 where .9999 equals 1
The area is squared, so 12-(1/3)2 which is .888 or about 88.8%
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.
The IKEA parking lots near me are multiple acres.
That was a bad example, IKEA parking lots are different sizes. Sorry about that.
No need to be sorry!
You’re right, sorry about that
No need to be sorry!
Sorry you guys had to write “No need to be sorry!”
You’re right, sorry about that
what’s that in barleycorns?
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It’s in square meters, to get square feet multiply by 10.
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%)
Wait, you’re telling me a football field is approximately one football field in size?
Association football fields actually have some flexibility in dimensions (less so for international play), so the 110x50 meter dimension of an NFL field would actually work for soccer
Another fun fact: the rules allow the goal lines to be a maximum of 90m, and the touch lines to be a minimum of 90m, so theoretically a square field could be legal
Edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
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.
1 mile long and 8 feet wide.
That might be accurate but that’s like the worst way to imagine the area.
You could have just said about 220 feet in each direction.
8 miles long, 1 foot wide… I’m pretty sure that’s worse.
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
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”.
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…
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.
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”
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.
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!
About 4000 square meters.
It’s equal to 4,840 square yards, or 4,046 square meters.
