Visualizing measurements
I just heard that the debis field for the Chinese balloon is an area that is 15 football fields by 15 football fields. I guess that means a rectangle containing 225 football fields. I had no idea how to visualize that, so I did a bit of figuring.
According to
a football field is 57,600 sq ft or 1.32 acres.
So 225 of those suckers would be about a half of a square mile or about 300 acres (not to put too fine a point on it).
Another story said that the field is 7 miles long. That would make it about 0.07 miles, or about 370 feet wide.
That doesn’t seem overwhelmly big, but the papers ignore that we are dealing with a volume instead of an area. Apparently the water is about 50 feet deep, and debris could be suspended at any depth, so the task may be a big one.
In any event, I don’t think that football field units make a lot of sense here.
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Well now, you see, my TV screen is about 40 inches wide and I can tell you the entire football field uses about three feet of that. That means the debris area is about 45 feet by 45 feet. ???
About 1960 I was in the house of an old couple that were church friends of my grandmother. Their son had recently purchased and installed a television in their home. The old man (80-something) was growing mentally feeble, as it was explained to a young boy. I was in the kitchen with my grandmother and the old woman when we heard the old man shouting, “Get that cow out of my house!!!” His grasp on reality versus television was poor.
The same applies to much of humanity today.
debris could be suspended at any depth, so the task may be a big one.
I would expect any interesting debris to be denser than water and thus on the bottom. I don’t think anyone cares about the balloon fabric, they want the sensor/telemetry package.
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