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Unit Confusion

491 statements
93 feature instances
44 referencing feature instances

Unit Confusion	type	FeatureClass
Unit Confusion	label	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion	page	UnitConfusion
Unit Confusion	comment	Many times when a measurement is given, the units of measurement don't make sense for what is being measured. This is especially annoying when the character suffering from Unit Confusion is supposed to be a scientific genius. This occurs frequently in Science Fiction. Compare Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale. It also tends to happen in lazy localizations that blindly substitute one unit for another of the same type. Averted when the writers use Fantastic Measurement System, as the writers can redefine time units whenever they like. If they care to keep it in mind.
Unit Confusion	fetched	2023-11-17T08:01:17Z
Unit Confusion	parsed	2023-11-17T08:01:17Z
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to AvertedTrope: Not an Item - IGNORE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to ChrisDeBurgh: Not an Item - IGNORE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to ComicallyMissingThePoint: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to DontBeRidiculous: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to EverybodyLives: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to ExploitedTrope: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to GoodWithNumbers: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to LesLuthiers: Not an Item - IGNORE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to Microts: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to PlayedForLaughs: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to RealLife: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to RoyalBrat: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to RussianHumor: Not an Item - UNKNOWN
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to ShapedLikeItself: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to StarWars: Not an Item - CAT
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to SubvertedTrope: Not an Item - CAT
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to TwoOfYourEarthMinutes: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingComment	Dropped link to parodiedtrope: Not an Item - FEATURE
Unit Confusion	processingUnknown	RussianHumor
Unit Confusion	isPartOf	DBTropes
Unit Confusion / int_1305c32	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_1305c32	comment	Kamen Rider Fourze acknowledges the light-year issue in episode 12, when space Otaku Yuuki meets the school's chairman, a former astronaut. She says she's read his book "for light-years" and he immediately responds "Incorrect, light-years are a measure of distance". Rather than a mistake, however, it seems that Yuuki said this on purpose as a pretext to quote more of his book.
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Unit Confusion / int_1a17ff62	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_1a17ff62	comment	The Way Series: The inside flaps of the dust jacket of Eon 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 The Slow Path reaches rather quickly. Fortunately, the book refers to a million kilometres in a completely different manner.
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The Way Series	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_1a17ff62
Unit Confusion / int_1a7918e3	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_1a7918e3	comment	Terranigma incorrectly exaggerates the age of the Earth in its opening, due to the "Blind Idiot" Translation of "46 okunen"note which coincidentally appears in the Japanese title of another Enix game as "46 billion years." (4.6 billion, of course, is the correct number.)
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Unit Confusion / int_1a7918e3	featureConfidence	1.0
Terranigma (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_1a7918e3
Unit Confusion / int_1cc09117	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_1cc09117	comment	In Bleach, Ryuken Ishida tells his injured son that if he yell 5 Hertz louder he'll reopen his wounds (basically telling him to shut up), but Hertz is a measure of frequency (high or low) not intensity (decibels in the case of sound). The dub changed the line to "decibels".
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Bleach (Manga)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_1cc09117
Unit Confusion / int_1d8b71dd	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_1d8b71dd	comment	Earth (The Book) ends with a survey for the reader to fill out as an "Application for Genetic Reconstitution by Aliens." One of the questions is "How many kilowatts would you say your brain produces hourly?"
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Earth (The Book)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_1d8b71dd
Unit Confusion / int_22147342	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_22147342	comment	Arrow: In one episode, tech genius Felicity claims that she has a teraflop of data to sort through. Teraflops are used to measure processing speed, not quantity.
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Unit Confusion / int_22211d68	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_22211d68	comment	Bones once referred to "Force in Newton-Meters". Unfortunately, the newton-metre is a unit of torque, equivalent to one joule per radian. The Newton-metre is also a unit of energy equivalent to the joule (as radians are dimensionless); in this case, the metre is the linear distance over which the force is applied rather than the distance from the fulcrum. Nevertheless, it's still not a unit of force, which is simply Newtons. However, force can be measured using a device called a "Newton meter", thus is can be measured by Newton meters, but not in Newton-metres.
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Unit Confusion / int_261c8d3f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons: Crazy Vaclav asserts that the car he's trying to sell will "do 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene". The hectare is a measure of area, not distance. Can be justified by the fact that Eastern European cars would be used for agricultural purposes and buyers would want to know how much of their fields they could cover per unit of fuel.note This is just over 1 square mile. Grampa Simpson hates the metric system. "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!" note If you're curious, that's approximately 120,000 liters per 100 km (0.002 miles per gallon). It must be a Hummer. Mr. Burns has trouble with metric too, like in the episode he drops a weight marked "1000 grams" (just over 2 lbs) on Homer, to his minor annoyance, and then comments that it sounded much heavier when he ordered it. 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. In the beginning in one episode where Homer takes the kids to school, he uses a GPS which gives him the distances in meters. The confusion leads him through a construction zone. From one of the Halloween episodes:
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Unit Confusion / int_27b0262b	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_27b0262b	comment	Even MythBusters made the "watts" mistake, displaying a chart showing the power consumption of light bulbs in "watts per hour".
Unit Confusion / int_27b0262b	featureApplicability	1.0
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Unit Confusion / int_4121629	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_4121629	comment	In a book of The Scrameustache, one Galaxian captain orders to reduce the speed by 2 parsecs. Perhaps it was short for "2 parsecs per year," the way someone going 25 m.p.h. might say "reduce our speed by 2 miles."
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Unit Confusion / int_42ffb88e	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_42ffb88e	comment	Happens in an SCP Foundation story "Units". There is a big difference between mA and MA, resulting in SCP-9017's escape. Blake didn't realize he has set the containment field circuit to nine orders of magnitude lower than normal because he didn't think it mattered.
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Unit Confusion / int_4b790c79	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_4b790c79	comment	In Iron Man, Tony Stark tells Yinsen that his mini arc reactor has a power output of 3.2 gigajoules per second (i.e. 3.2 gigawatts). Yinsen says that it could power his heart for a thousand lifetimes, and Tony responds, "Or something big for 15 minutes". Gigawatt is a measurement of power, not potential energy, so Yinsen shouldn't know that. Tony may have decided it wasn't important enough to correct him.
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Unit Confusion / int_4c44acb7	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_4c44acb7	comment	One of the many possible definitions of the diagonal in Mornington Crescent (specifically Archbald's Metropolitan Logorhythmic Progression) states "the diagonal shall be agreed to be any angle being agreed to be an angle between the angle of one degree and the angle of three hundred and fifty nine degrees ... Celsius".
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Unit Confusion / int_4e45b093	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_4e45b093	comment	The Big Bang Theory: Brought up in one episode. Penny is talking to Sheldon (a theoretical physicist) and says something like "I guess you would say 'light-years ahead of his time'". Sheldon responds, "I wouldn't say that. Nobody would. Nobody who knows what they're talking about, anyway." In the episode "The Romance Resonance" Sheldon uses square meters instead of square centimeters, meaning his solution is off by 10,000. He asks Amy if she realizes what this means; she replies "Americans still can't handle the metric system?" 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.
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Unit Confusion / int_50bcf7a6	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_50bcf7a6	comment	In Homestuck, Terezi claims to be 6 in her first conversation with Dave, who is kind of shocked. Though, at this point of the story, the reader is aware that Alternian Solar Sweeps are longer than Earth years. To clarify, trolls are about the same age as the kids (13 years).
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Unit Confusion / int_510974b4	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_510974b4	comment	In Johnny Test, the girls have used Newtons as a unit for magnetic force. While technically correct, Teslas would have been a much better unit, because they measure the strength of the field. The force also varies with the velocity of the charged particle.
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Unit Confusion / int_53b30902	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_53b30902	comment	The English dub of Valkyria Chronicles does this with military units by mistranslating shotai as "squad" instead of "platoon"—the latter being the correct size for the army unit depicted as well as the appropriate unit to be commanded by a lieutenant.
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Unit Confusion / int_58f9634	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_58f9634	comment	Used intentionally as a major plot point in This is Spın̈al Tap. While trying to work out a big, stadium-pleasing onstage stunt to help the show, Nigel draws plans for a Stonehenge monument on a diner napkin, and the monument is built to the exact specifications he wrote, 18 inches (18"), not the intended 18 feet (18'). This leads to "a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf." This has actually happened (in the opposite direction) to Black Sabbath in Real Life.
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Unit Confusion / int_593d139f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_593d139f	comment	Exaggerated in Dave Barry Slept Here, which gives the distance of West Berlin behind the Iron Curtain as "120 miles (325 kilograms) (30936.54 hectares) (2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes)." That's one unit of distance, one unit of mass, one unit of area, and one class of arthropod.
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Unit Confusion / int_5c897f4a	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_5c897f4a	comment	Early Schlock Mercenary strips have a nasty habit of referring to "watts of energy." Even as late as the third book, while it gets right that terawatt-nanoseconds would be a unit of energy (one more commonly known as the "kilojoule"), it treats it as though nanoseconds make it more incomprehensibly huge than "terawatt-hours" or, say, "terawatt-millennia." It also plays with this trope with some things, such as freem, which are explained as the amount of pay a "Poliflorian Hypernetter earns about two thousand Freem during one Efrickalian work-week."
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Unit Confusion / int_5ce51054	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_5ce51054	comment	Parodied in Frazz, when Caulfield points out rather loudly that light-years are a measure of distance. The teacher then tells him to quiet down because he's "making a ton of noise."
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Frazz (Comic Strip)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_5ce51054
Unit Confusion / int_5efbf032	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_5efbf032	comment	The Asterisk War: Irene Urzaiz uses the term "fanega" to describe micro-singularities she can fire at her opponents. The fanega is the Spanish bushel, a measurement of volume rather than of mass, force, or acceleration, any of which would be more apt for a Gravity Master.
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Unit Confusion / int_60996c02	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_60996c02	comment	In an episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series Spider-Man specifies a frequency in microfarads. Frequency is normally measured in hertz whereas the farad is a unit of electrical capacitance. The fact that Spider-Man was smart enough to be able to guess the correct frequency for the Techno Babble that he was trying to pull off should have made this mistake unthinkable.
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Unit Confusion / int_637554db	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_637554db	comment	The plot of one episode of The Middleman revolves around "4000 angstroms of Balthorium-G"; an angstrom is a unit of length, not mass or volume. Word of God is that the writers were perfectly aware of this, but did it anyway because they thought it sounded better. Better yet the angstrom is equal to a tenth of a nanometre and is used because its about the diameter of an atom. So 4000 angstroms is only 0.4 micrometres, or less than a bacterium (which are between 1 and 10 microns) long.
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Unit Confusion / int_6595c98a	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_6595c98a	comment	In The Goes Wrong Show, in the episode "A Trial To Watch", some setpieces of a play are designed in inches, but the set engineers misread them as being in centimetres. Hilarity Ensues.
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Unit Confusion / int_67856816	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_67856816	comment	Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?: 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.) Not to mention the fact that the phrase "during one kilowatt hour" is just plain wrong as it implies a kilowatt hour is a unit of time (it is a unit of energy, equal to 3.6 Megajoules).
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Unit Confusion / int_69fa7496	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_69fa7496	comment	Disney Ducks Comic Universe: Scrooge McDuck has often boasted of his money bin storing "three cubic acres" of cash. An acre, of course, is a two-dimensional shape, and cubing it would create a geometrically-impossible six-dimensional shape. Although that would go a long way towards explaining just how all those countless billions fit inside that single building. handwave Carl Barks could have meant that Scrooge's money bin consisted of three enormous cubes of cash, roughly 64 m on a side, which would give each side of said cube an area of one acre. Done intentionally in a story where Brigitta has been visiting Scrooge and, seeing he has an oral thermometer giving out a temperature of almost a hundred, goes crazy with the frenzy of curing him from his tremendous fever. When Scrooge can finally get a word in, he points out she had wrongly assumed his thermometer gives the temperature in Celsius but it actually gives it in Fahrenheit. She demands he thank her for lowering his fever from almost a hundred to 37.
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Unit Confusion / int_6ada53b1	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_6ada53b1	comment	In one episode of NUMB3RS involving a train wreck, Charlie maps out an extremely precise route for the agents to take to rescue trapped survivors, but when Colby attempts it, he gets stuck at a dead end. When Colby then repeats the directions back to Charlie, Charlie realizes what's missing.
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Unit Confusion / int_6c1d09b1	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_6c1d09b1	comment	The manual for Fallout, written from an In-Universe perspective from Vault-Tec (the company which made the vaults), suffers from several mistakes in one unit when it gives the technical specifications for Vault 13. Among them is: "Power requirements.....3.98mkw/day". Even assuming that the w is supposed to mean Watts (which have the symbol W, being named after a person) and ignoring the pointless prefixes which seem to cancel each other out (m would mean times 1/1000 while k means times 1000), Watts are already a unit of power, so the "per day" part is redundant. Justified somewhat in that Vault-Tec is portrayed throughout the manual as tending to cut corners and not being very knowledgeable about what they're doing.
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Unit Confusion / int_6f1dfbf0	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_6f1dfbf0	comment	Myth Adventures: 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.
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Unit Confusion / int_6f734712	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_6f734712	comment	Chloe Sullivan also does this a couple of times in Smallville. For instance (in the context of a discussion involving time travel): That makes it sound like she may or may not have been left drifting in deep space. Unfortunate implications, indeed!
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Unit Confusion / int_70814599	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_70814599	comment	At one point in Stargate SG-1, the team is in a rapidly-cooling room and needs to find a source of heat. Carter informs everyone that they just "passed –40 degrees". Jackson asks if that's Fahrenheit or Celsius, and Mitchell responds that it doesn't matter: the two scales are the same at that point.
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Unit Confusion / int_7832b74c	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_7832b74c	comment	Steven Universe: In "Chille Tid", an exhausted Pearl at one point mistakenly says they've been "searching for light-years" for Malachite/Lapis Lazuli and Jasper. An equally-exhausted Amethyst sort-of corrects her by replying "light-years measure light, not years".
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Unit Confusion / int_7cf5a07	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_7cf5a07	comment	In The Flash (2014), Barry Allen discovers that he cannot get drunk anymore due to his new powers, even from a "500 proof" dose of alcohol. The problem? Proof is a measure of how much alcohol is in a beverage, and cutting it in half gives you the percentage. So, a 100-proof drink would is 50% alcohol. This means that pure alcohol would still only be 200-proof and that a 500-proof drink is nonsensical and impossible to create by definition (as it'd have to contain 250% alcohol).
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Unit Confusion / int_81692f99	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_81692f99	comment	Star Trek: Several Star Trek episodes have used the word "teradyne" as a unit of computer processing power. "Dyne" in the Trek universe seems to mean "a small amount of whatever it is we're talking about right now." Additionally, an episode of Star Trek: Voyager gave the power output of the warp core in "teradynes per second". Dynes are a unit of force, not energy. The Voyager writers had trouble even keeping their own fictional units straight. On at least one occasion, "cochranes" were used (quite incorrectly) as a measure of explosive yield, rather than the proper usage as a measure of warp field strength. The term "iso" has been added to both tons and rems (a measure of radiation). Iso means "equal" or "homogenous", suggesting that it's either meaningless (e.g. 6,000 isorems means 6,000 rems), some weird "equivalent to that much as far as we're concerned" shorthand taking into account bizarre Star Trek science or, as the term is often used when someone's explaining how screwed they are, means "It's 6,000 fucking rems out there!" And then there's the Royal Brat from "Elann of Troyus" who joins the ranks of those who think that "light-year" measures time instead of distance. Then again, considering that she is a snob who's disdainful of anything STEM-related, that may have been intentional on the part of the writers. Star Trek: The Next Generation: "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 Space Is Cold. This was due to someone deciding to swap out the word "Fahrenheit" with "Celsius" at the last minute 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). In "True Q", Data gives the Enterprise's reactor output as "12.75 billion gigawatts per second". Quite apart from the fact that this puts the reactor output into Kardashev Type I territory, the only thing that's measured in gigawatts per second would be a power ramp-up curve (watts and other units of power already contain an implicit time measurement). 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.
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Unit Confusion / int_843e2082	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_843e2082	comment	The Sparklehorse album Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. Perhaps the mountain was hurtling through space.
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Sparklehorse (Music)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_843e2082
Unit Confusion / int_847a1ace	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_847a1ace	comment	In a rather literal meta-example of this trope, there was much confusion over the definition of the term "unit" from Attack of the Clones (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 R.A. Salvatore's novelization (and Patricia C. Wrede's Junior novelization) stated it to refer to an individual clone. (They later took issue with Karen Traviss' Republic Commando Series, misattributing the problem to her.) In context, "unit" meant used a unit of product. After the Disney reboot, Complete Locations would continue this.
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Attack of the Clones	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_847a1ace
Unit Confusion / int_8525bf6a	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_8525bf6a	comment	Lampshaded in Doki Doki! PreCure's ending Dancing Theme, "Kono Sora no Mukou".
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Unit Confusion / int_8525bf6a	featureConfidence	1.0
Doki Doki! PreCure	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_8525bf6a
Unit Confusion / int_86c3beca	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_86c3beca	comment	In Girl Genius, a veteran airman breaks out an old mnemonic when his airship is attacked by a swarm of fiery robots: "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.
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Girl Genius (Webcomic)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_86c3beca
Unit Confusion / int_8b7b9cd5	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_8b7b9cd5	comment	The most famous example of all: Han Solo bragging in A New Hope 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 Retconned 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, and would have no meaning in "a galaxy far, far away". (It's possible "parsec" has some standardised meaning across the galaxy similar to the way a "year" always refers to a Coruscanti year.) 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. Another explanation offered was that the Kessel Run was between multiple points that were moving apart from each other, starting from Kessel. The implication was that to visit each point with a total traveled distance of only twelve parsecs was quite fast indeed. To further confuse the issue, J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars makes the claim that a "par-sec is a navigational calculation, not a measurement of time; that is, the ship is fast because it's smart." Solo: A Star Wars Story provides an official explanation: the safe route for the Kessel Run is 20 parsecs long, but Han took a dangerous shortcut that cut it down to a bit over twelve (because he had the more dangerous problem of transporting unrefined coaxium that was in danger of exploding unless he got it to a refinery ASAP). Amusingly, this is also consistent with the "Han is a blowhard" interpretation: as impressive as Han's feat was, he still didn't make it in "less than twelve parsecs" as he claimed, just also not fourteen like Rey thought. There's also a throwaway line in Attack of the Clones where Padmé says "Geonosis is less than a parsec away", which might be an underhanded attempt to rectify the earlier confusion.
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A New Hope	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_8b7b9cd5
Unit Confusion / int_8bd02a57	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_8bd02a57	comment	Ghost Trick: In the ending, Beauty and Dandy are breaking into a safe above Chicken Kitchen with gunpowder. Dandy reads the instructions for twenty kilograms of gunpowder instead of twenty grams.
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Ghost Trick (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_8bd02a57
Unit Confusion / int_8da0ea80	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_8da0ea80	comment	Pokémon Red and Blue (as well as their remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen) referenced the light-year mistake with the Junior Trainer (Camper in the remakes) in Brock's gym, saying you're "light-years from facing Brock", but then acknowledging the mistake after you beat him.
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PokÃ©mon Red and Blue (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_8da0ea80
Unit Confusion / int_93985d2b	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_93985d2b	comment	In Plan 9 from Outer Space, one of the aliens says "Foolish humans, we have had space travel for eons of your light-years." An aeon being one billion years and a light-year being a measure of distance... (Then again, this is the same alien who said that "A ray of sunlight is made up of many atoms.")
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Unit Confusion / int_9591f30c	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9591f30c	comment	In Time Bandits, Robin Hood (played by John Cleese) asks one of the bandits how long he's been a robber, and the bandit gives his height: four foot one. Robin Hood stammers for a moment before politely responding, "That is a... long time, isn't it?"
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Time Bandits	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_9591f30c
Unit Confusion / int_95e4bed	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_95e4bed	comment	In Sequential Art squirrels try to build giant robots to fight a giant bug and forgot to agree if they are using millimeters or centimeters. But they like the resulting battle armor even better.
Unit Confusion / int_95e4bed	featureApplicability	1.0
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Sequential Art (Webcomic)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_95e4bed
Unit Confusion / int_9a65ef49	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9a65ef49	comment	In the movie Stealth, the processing speed of the AI was given in "terabits per second". This is not a unit of processing speed, but throughput. Processing speed would probably be measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second) or flops (floating point operations per second), though the processing speed needed to keep up with I/O rates in the Tbps would still have to be impressive.
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Unit Confusion / int_9af804ae	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9af804ae	comment	Many people like to sound clever by pointing out that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is 60,000 miles, and thus impossibly deep (the deepest part of the ocean is less than 3 leagues down), but this figure is the distance traveled in the book, not the depth they reach. But "Twenty Thousand Leagues Whilst Under The Sea" isn't quite as pithy. Verne consistently used a metric league (lieue, if you wish) of exactly 4 km in his works, thus the name translates into 80,000 km or ~50,000 statute miles, or almost exactly double circumnavigation (there's only a single one in the book, due to inevitable deviations from the shortest route). However this again brings the confusion as in Belgium the metric lieue is defined differently than in France and corresponds to five kilometres instead of four.
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Unit Confusion / int_9f5af515	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9f5af515	comment	In the documentary Forensic Files on TruTv, it is stated that a gunshot produced 120 decibels of sound, and that 70 decibels, or "about 60%" of that, went through to an adjacent room. The decibel scale is logarithmic, with 20 dB being equivalent to a factor of 10 increase in (Pa) amplitude, so 70 dB is really about 0.3% of 120 dB measuring by the raw pressure function. For comparison, 120 dB is just short of the pain threshold, about as loud as sitting in the front row at a rock concert or using a power saw. 70 dB is a little louder than a normal speaking voice. For the sound of a gunshot heard through a wall, the 60% figure seems accurate; the 70 dB not so much.
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Forensic Files	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_9f5af515
Unit Confusion / int_9f830fe0	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9f830fe0	comment	Bored of the Rings has a footnote defining a league as "approximately 3 furlongs or only a knot short of a hectare." While in Real Life leagues were once defined in terms of furlongs, knots and hectares are altogether different types of units.
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Bored of the Rings	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_9f830fe0
Unit Confusion / int_9fb1a9fe	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_9fb1a9fe	comment	Hadriex tried to convert the vague system Heroes of Might and Magic 3 uses to count enemy units into something he could wrap his head around. Like Metric. It didn't work out so well.
Unit Confusion / int_9fb1a9fe	featureApplicability	1.0
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Hadriex (Web Video)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_9fb1a9fe
Unit Confusion / int_a57cf54d	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_a57cf54d	comment	In the Darths & Droids take on the "twelve parsecs" line, the real Han Solo (the film's Greedo) tells Jim's character "It did the Kessel run in less than three standard days. That's twelve parsecs, kiddo", meaning that this is how long the Kessel run is. When Jim's character steals Han's identity, he completely misremembers this. When called on it, he switches to light years. (And, bizarrely, gets the conversion right.)
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Darths & Droids (Webcomic)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_a57cf54d
Unit Confusion / int_abbbb26e	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_abbbb26e	comment	Poucelina (the French version of Thumbelina) has the Prince singing "Depuis des années-lumière, je n'attends que toi." ("For light-years, I've been waiting for you.")
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Thumbelina (1994)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_abbbb26e
Unit Confusion / int_abc65d15	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_abc65d15	comment	The episode "Getting Barry Higher In The World" of Last of the Summer Wine features Seymour enlisting Wesley to build them a kite, but Wesley assumes that because Seymour's a pompous schoolteacher with a university education, all the figures on his plan are in metres rather than feet. The kite comes out over three times too large, but when it turns out to work as a hang-glider, Seymour claims I Meant to Do That.
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Last of the Summer Wine	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_abc65d15
Unit Confusion / int_ad6b641b	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ad6b641b	comment	In The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape uses "light-year" as a measurement of time.
Unit Confusion / int_ad6b641b	featureApplicability	1.0
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The Screwtape Letters	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ad6b641b
Unit Confusion / int_ad7edd1f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ad7edd1f	comment	Kaamelott: Arthur once told Perceval and Karadoc that a good sword stance involved facing the foe and turning 30 degrees. Perceval and Karadoc, naturally, decided this involved ice cubes.
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Kaamelott	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ad7edd1f
Unit Confusion / int_ad8541c9	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ad8541c9	comment	In Encyclopedia Brown's defense, one story referenced this trope in its solution: a man claiming to be a sailor is 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.
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Encyclopedia Brown	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ad8541c9
Unit Confusion / int_b0fc9724	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b0fc9724	comment	An episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Kelsey Grammer highlighted the confusion pointed out above regarding 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nemo calmly explains that he misspoke and he should have used fathoms to indicate depth. However, the other characters (even The Professor) end up describing every unit of measurement, even time, in terms of leagues, leading to Nemo being brought to the edge of madness before being dragged away by a giant squid.
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Saturday Night Live	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b0fc9724
Unit Confusion / int_b2296c8b	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b2296c8b	comment	In Battle for Terra, the phrase "cubic pounds of air" is used twice.
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Battle for Terra	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b2296c8b
Unit Confusion / int_b295cab3	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b295cab3	comment	Aeon 14: 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: she mistakenly wrote "light-years" instead of "kilometers" and her editor didn't catch it.
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Aeon 14	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b295cab3
Unit Confusion / int_b3708359	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b3708359	comment	Solo: A Star Wars Story provides an official explanation: the safe route for the Kessel Run is 20 parsecs long, but Han took a dangerous shortcut that cut it down to a bit over twelve (because he had the more dangerous problem of transporting unrefined coaxium that was in danger of exploding unless he got it to a refinery ASAP). Amusingly, this is also consistent with the "Han is a blowhard" interpretation: as impressive as Han's feat was, he still didn't make it in "less than twelve parsecs" as he claimed, just also not fourteen like Rey thought.
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Solo	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b3708359
Unit Confusion / int_b370c498	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b370c498	comment	In the second Taxi film, a policeman's French dialogue indicates that the protagonist's souped-up taxi was traveling at '200 kilomètres à l'heure' (200 kilometres per hour). In the English subtitles, this is blindly translated as '200 miles an hour'. It has no bearing on the plot, but it credits the vehicle as going much faster than it really is (124 miles per hour).
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Taxi	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b370c498
Unit Confusion / int_b3f687d1	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b3f687d1	comment	FoxTrot: Parodied/subverted in a strip: Jason is playing a racing videogame while his mother is trying to get him to come to dinner. Jason, who had earlier said "Just a sec," clarifies that he meant a parsec; just until he drove an entire parsec in the game, which would take him over 10 million years. 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 standard oven temperature for baking, 350 degrees Celsius is much higher than most ovens can go, and 350 kelvins isn't even hot enough to boil water. Also, the instructions will most likely specify which temperature system is to be used, precisely to avoid this kind of misunderstanding. Peter sarcastically suggested that he rotate the oven almost a full circle. "Don't be silly, Peter."
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FoxTrot (Comic Strip)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b3f687d1
Unit Confusion / int_b4963c9f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b4963c9f	comment	Defied in many episodes of Good Eats, where Alton Brown instructs his viewers to measure out X ounces of a dry good by weight. The emphasis on weight has two purposes: first, weight is generally a more precise indication than volume; second (and more relevant to this trope), it's so that viewers don't try measuring by volume (i.e. in fluid ounces).
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Good Eats	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_b4963c9f
Unit Confusion / int_b618b457	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b618b457	comment	An in-universe example in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 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.
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Unit Confusion / int_b683f90f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_b683f90f	comment	Perry Rhodan 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 come back...
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Unit Confusion / int_be492827	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_be492827	comment	Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: The game manages to do this with its fictional measurement of time, the cycle. While the length of one cycle is never really stated, based on its use in the Space Pirate logbooks it would seem to be analogous to something between a few months and a year. However the Luminoth elder U'mos is described as being several centicycles old. They probably meant several hundred cycles, but the prefic centi means one-hundredth. Presumably the writers either weren't aware of the correct prefix, or just decided it sounded cooler than "hectocycle".
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Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_be492827
Unit Confusion / int_bfa1d565	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_bfa1d565	comment	Boston Legal: An opposing counsel threatened to "drag it out for light-years" if the main characters declined a settlement offer. (How far the pages will stretch?)
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Boston Legal	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_bfa1d565
Unit Confusion / int_c43df4d8	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who: In "The Seeds of Death", the thermostat shows a temperature above 60 degrees Centigrade after being turned up by Zoe to incapacitate the Ice Warriors. It has the desired effect on them, but the humans show no ill-effects, not even breaking sweat. In reality, such a temperature would be deadly within minutes to humans.note At the time the serial was made, most of the British populace was much more familiar with the Fahrenheit scale, so the person responsible for the prop likely didn't realize they were showing such an extreme temperature.
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Unit Confusion / int_c9633211	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_c9633211	comment	No More Heroes: An infamous example occurs in the lawnmowing minigame, where "square meter" has been culturally "translated" into "acre" (roughly four thousand square metres).
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No More Heroes (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_c9633211
Unit Confusion / int_ca7eba72	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ca7eba72	comment	Parodied in Star Wreck, where the twist in the maggothole (sic) is stated to be several mega-parsec-seconds in the Finnish original, and googol-fluxoms in English translation. Naturally, neither of those make any sense.
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Star Wreck (Web Animation)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ca7eba72
Unit Confusion / int_cac1f772	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_cac1f772	comment	CSI: "Overload" includes, among its many atrocities against physics, Grissom confidently stating that "terminal velocity is 9.8 meters per second squared". High school physics should be enough to know that metres per second squared measure acceleration, not velocity (terminal or other). In the season 14 episode "Girls Gone Wild", the team tries to find a grow op in a small town by checking the power consumption of houses in the area. Unfortunately, they mix up watt hours and watts, leading to them describing an average home as using 900 kW and their suspect using a whopping 5 MW. That little town would have needed its own nuclear reactor...
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Unit Confusion / int_cc32f7c3	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_cc32f7c3	comment	For their 1983-84 Born Again tour, Black Sabbath had planned to have several Stonehenge-like monuments onstage. Unfortunately, the monuments were built 15 meters in height (rather than the intended 15 feet), meaning each one was almost 50 feet high. This inspired the "Stonehenge" scene in This is Spın̈al Tap, where the problem was inverted.
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Unit Confusion / int_cd69fa57	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_cd69fa57	comment	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 mass and energy are equivalent (E=mc2). 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.
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Unit Confusion / int_d109f322	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_d109f322	comment	Andromeda: In the last season, Rommie refers to having been shut down for nanomillennia as if that's a long time. Nano- is a prefix meaning one billionth. One nanomillennium is about 31.5 seconds. One thousand nanomillennia is still less than one day. This might be considered a long time to a computer, but since Rommie had been offline for longer periods previously, that makes it a mistake.
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Unit Confusion / int_d46cc708	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_d46cc708	comment	In one episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, Edd is working on an old radio, and realizes he'd mistaken a "fifteen-amp resistor" for another part. The problem is, amps are used to measure current, and the ohm is used to measure resistance. Resistors have power handling specifications too, but the unit for those is the watt, so that doesn't help.
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Unit Confusion / int_d5ddd6c1	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_d5ddd6c1	comment	Pokémon: The Series 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.
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PokÃ©mon: The Series	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_d5ddd6c1
Unit Confusion / int_d6677b9	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_d6677b9	comment	A Mafalda strip has a teacher giving her students a math word problem where they have to calculate the area of a field measuring X by Y hectares. Amusingly enough, a later compilation featured an entire page of sketches by the author mocking himself for the mistake (the best is one where Susanita says "Hey Quino, you big idiot! How many liters are there in a kilometer?")
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Mafalda (Comic Strip)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_d6677b9
Unit Confusion / int_d68df17d	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_d68df17d	comment	Top Gear has a tendency to parody this. James May, being Good with Numbers, gives accurate conversions but refers to metric and imperial respectively as 'Roman Catholic' and 'Church of England'. Jeremy Clarkson on the other hand deadpans complete nonsense such as measuring torque by spreading his hands apart and saying 'about that much'. Another thing Jezza was fond of doing was using "torque" without specifying what unit (pound feet, newton metres, etc) he was giving the torque figure in, and instead treating the word "torque" as a unit of measurement in and of itself. He would also pluralise the word "torque". "This new supercharged doodad has over 500 torques!" Played for Laughs, obviously.
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Top Gear	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_d68df17d
Unit Confusion / int_dac5fe30	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_dac5fe30	comment	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 in a 90s 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 Virtua Racing, Daytona USA, and even other OutRun games where you're just driving a Ferrari (or a 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.
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OutRun (Video Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_dac5fe30
Unit Confusion / int_e5c5bc22	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_e5c5bc22	comment	As a "watts" example in reverse, GURPS sourcebooks insists on referring to kilojoules as "kilowatt-seconds". Although technically correct this is inelegant and confusing and proof that, even with the constant calls for them to abandon Imperial units, Steve Jackson Games shouldn't be let loose with SI. They can't even keep that much straight. Centimeters get used from time to time, generally for weapons. More confusingly the abbreviation mps is used to talk about mile per second despite the fact that even people in the US think of it as metres per second. That bit Steve Jackson at least gets correct. The abbreviation for metres per second is m/s or ms-1. In at least one GURPS Traveller supplement, there's an extended sidebar on the difference between short tons, long tons, metric tons, water-displacement tons, and liquid hydrogen-displacement tons, all of which have some relevance in the setting. (A "100-ton ship", in Traveller, has a volume equal to 100 metric tons of LH2.)
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GURPS (Tabletop Game)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_e5c5bc22
Unit Confusion / int_e936047a	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_e936047a	comment	In the episode of Hey Arnold! where they try to get into the world record book, their attempt at the largest pizza pocket fails when Sid misinterprets "tsp" for the yeast requirement as "ten square pounds" instead of "teaspoons".
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Unit Confusion / int_ea4f62db	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ea4f62db	comment	In the Family Guy Star Wars episode "Blue Harvest", Han Solo (Peter Griffin) claimed that the Millennium Falcon completed the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Luke (Chris Griffin) then tells an astonished Han that parsecs are a measure of distance, not time.
Unit Confusion / int_ea4f62db	featureApplicability	1.0
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Family Guy	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ea4f62db
Unit Confusion / int_eb049de6	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_eb049de6	comment	In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Moran is credited as a hugely proficient rifle marksman for making a shot over 650 yards with a 7-8 miles per hour side wind. This is shown in a flashback, which shows a dark night with very harsh wind conditions. However, a 7-8 miles per hour wind would barely be perceptible, and the wind conditions shown would be pretty in-line with a 7-8 metre per second wind speed.
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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_eb049de6
Unit Confusion / int_ec28245c	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ec28245c	comment	The first English dub of Dragon Ball Z falls victim to this trope: When Bulma is explaining to the group why traveling to Namek would be impossible, she gives her answer in years, then promptly adds "And that's in light-years!" Perhaps Bulma is distinguishing years in an ordinary slower-than-light craft from years at c.
Unit Confusion / int_ec28245c	featureApplicability	1.0
Unit Confusion / int_ec28245c	featureConfidence	1.0
Dragon Ball Z	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ec28245c
Unit Confusion / int_eef6621b	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_eef6621b	comment	Event Horizon messes has quite a few lines which contain physics whoppers that can spoil its Cosmic Horror mood. The Lewis and Clark is a space ship which develops a breach in the hull. Smitty claims that the ship has 218 liters of air left. But a body of gas fills up however much space the container that holds them has, meaning they should have measured how much was left in mass or pressure. Additionally, 218 liters is not a very large volume. It's approximately forty-five gallons, which would fit in about a fifth of a cubic meter. In other words, a space about three feet long by three feet wide by a little more than half a foot deep. It seems that Smitty is talking about the air in the cabin, which has a volume roughly equivalent to that of a small ranch house. If 218 liters of air under Earth-like atmospheric pressure then expanded to fill that space, anyone without a sealed space suit (like Smitty) would be dying of irreconcilable pressure and temperature differences. If the ship stored reserve air, expanding that air from 218 liters to the size of the cabin would cause it to become very, very cold very fast, just like a can of pressurized air for cleaning electronics does when you lower the pressure quickly.
Unit Confusion / int_eef6621b	featureApplicability	1.0
Unit Confusion / int_eef6621b	featureConfidence	1.0
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Unit Confusion / int_ef076a36	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ef076a36	comment	Several Star Trek episodes have used the word "teradyne" as a unit of computer processing power. "Dyne" in the Trek universe seems to mean "a small amount of whatever it is we're talking about right now." Additionally, an episode of Star Trek: Voyager gave the power output of the warp core in "teradynes per second". Dynes are a unit of force, not energy.
Unit Confusion / int_ef076a36	featureApplicability	1.0
Unit Confusion / int_ef076a36	featureConfidence	1.0
Star Trek: Voyager	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_ef076a36
Unit Confusion / int_efccb9da	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_efccb9da	comment	Voltron: Legendary Defender: Besides Earth, the entire universe uses Altean units of measurement (presumably enforced by the Galra Empire). The human characters get used to using them pretty quickly, but we're never given an explanation for any of them except for the tick, which is slightly longer than an Earth second. This lets the show keep things like time and distance vague while making the characters sound like they know what they're talking about.
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Unit Confusion / int_efccb9da	featureConfidence	1.0
Voltron: Legendary Defender	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_efccb9da
Unit Confusion / int_f74b5f80	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_f74b5f80	comment	Babylon 5: In "Messages from Earth", one spaceship evades another by hiding in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The pressure on the exterior of the ship as it descends is given in "gravities", although gravities are a measure of acceleration and not pressure, which is very different. An example involving a unit made up for the show. Early on, it was decided that time on the station would be measured in cycles, possibly to avert Two of Your Earth Minutes. Unfortunately, none of the writers seemed to be able to agree on what a cycle was equivalent to (i.e. is it an hour? A day? A minute?). The idea was scrapped before the end of the first season. This was Lampshaded in a later episode when Ivanova stated that she was going to hold some troublemakers in custody for a Drazi cycle, after which the problems they were causing on the station would be sorted out. The Drazi she's explaining this to laughs, and points out that a cycle is a Drazi year, not a Drazi month.
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Babylon 5	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_f74b5f80
Unit Confusion / int_f86f4d4f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_f86f4d4f	comment	In an episode of the Australian series Ship to Shore, a report (later revealed to be false) came in of a tsunami 30 feet (10 metres) high came in. Since some of the older islanders still used imperial units, the confusion snowballed to the point that the wave was supposedly 900 metres (3000 feet) high, and the islanders prepared for Armageddon.
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Ship to Shore	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_f86f4d4f
Unit Confusion / int_fae48d18	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_fae48d18	comment	In The Prayer Warriors Threat of Satanic Commonism, Benry sells 2,000 kilograms of drugs to Rika and Books for $10 per kilogram, which is quite cheap. Books then leaves with the 2,000 kg of drugs (over 4,000 pounds) too quickly for Grover to shoot him with a sniper rifle.
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The Prayer Warriors (Fanfic)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_fae48d18
Unit Confusion / int_faeff512	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_faeff512	comment	In Outlaw Star, a load of 5 tonnes of dragonite the crew pick up turns out to be far less valuable than expected. The explanation was that it was "low density"—except the mass was already stated, so the density wouldn't matter for how much it was. They probably meant to say "low-purity" (i.e. how much of the stone's mass was actual useable material).
Unit Confusion / int_faeff512	featureApplicability	1.0
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OutlawStar	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_faeff512
Unit Confusion / int_fb9c177d	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_fb9c177d	comment	In Transformers, (well, some series, anyway) "light-year" has been a unit of time. Transformers has more units of time and distance than you can shake an exhaust pipe at. Most of them have never been explicitly defined, so any of them could be this trope.
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Unit Confusion / int_fb9c177d	featureConfidence	1.0
Transformers (Franchise)	hasFeature	Unit Confusion / int_fb9c177d
Unit Confusion / int_ff9ab17f	type	Unit Confusion
Unit Confusion / int_ff9ab17f	comment	Star Trek: The Next Generation: "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 Space Is Cold. This was due to someone deciding to swap out the word "Fahrenheit" with "Celsius" at the last minute 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). In "True Q", Data gives the Enterprise's reactor output as "12.75 billion gigawatts per second". Quite apart from the fact that this puts the reactor output into Kardashev Type I territory, the only thing that's measured in gigawatts per second would be a power ramp-up curve (watts and other units of power already contain an implicit time measurement). 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.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Unit Confusion	processingCategory2	Speculative Fiction Tropes
Frazz (Comic Strip) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Prayer Warriors (Fanfic) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
A New Hope / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Ghostbusters (1984) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Plan 9 from Outer Space / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
This is Spın̈al Tap / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Asterisk War / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Encyclopedia Brown / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Incompetence / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Myth Adventures / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Asterisk War / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Eagle Down Under / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Screwtape Letters / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
BinaryPrefix	seeAlso	Unit Confusion
The Goon Show (Radio) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Father Ted / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Good Eats / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Lost in Space (2018) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Ship to Shore / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Space Force (2020) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Star Fleet / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Star Trek: Voyager / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Goes Wrong Show / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Middleman / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Corporation (Tabletop Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Spelljammer (Tabletop Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Ghost Trick (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Kittens Game (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
No More Heroes (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
OutRun (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
PokÃ©mon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
PokÃ©mon Red and Blue (Video Game) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Life of Boris (Web Video) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
xkcd (Webcomic) / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Batman: The Brave and the Bold / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Dragon Hunters / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Duckman / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Loonatics Unleashed / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Pickle and Peanut / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
The Mind's Eye / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion
Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami / Fan Fic / int_6112a91d	type	Unit Confusion

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