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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]]. 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.
 
{{examples|Examples}}
 
== General ==
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* Confusion between metric units and [[American Customary Measurements]] occurs all too often, in TV and in real life, where a person accustomed to using one may not realize that a foreigner is giving them numbers in meters rather than feet.
** In TV, [[Hilarity Ensues]]. An example from ''[[Last of the Summer Wine]]'' involves Wesley assuming the pretentious Seymour used metres rather than feet in his design for a kite, with the result being the size of a hang glider.
** In real life, it [http://www.cracked.com/article_16521_p2.html causes Mars Climate Orbiters to disappear], or [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider:Gimli Glider|planes to run out of fuel half-way through their scheduled trip]].
* Confusion between Imperial and American Customary measurements is common as well. The two share the names of measurements, and lengths are the same value in both, but not volumes - pints and gallons for example.
* In relativistic calculations, the speed of light is often set to the unitless number 1, as this simplifies equations (for example, E=mc<sup>2</sup> becomes E=m). This makes time and space use the same units, so that a light-year actually does measure time as well as space (it's equivalent to one year). It's doubtful that this justifies any of the other examples on this page.
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** With some mucking around with unit conversions it is possible to measure ''mass'' in units of distance. Starting from kilograms, multiply by G (the gravitational constant) then divide by c<sup>2</sup>. This leaves you with your mass in meters, which will be very small (the Earth's mass is about 9 millimeters).
*** Incidentally, this is the formula for a Schwarzchild radius (i.e. where a black hole's event horizon is). So a black hole with a mass equal to Earth's would be 9 mm in radius, or 18 mm across. As a quick approximation, a black hole's radius is 3 km for every Solar mass it has. A theoretical black hole with a mass equal to the mass of the observable universe would have a radius about equal to the radius of the observable universe.
* The confusion regarding storage space. To a computer, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes and so on. However, to hard drive manufacturers, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, etc. To avoid confusion in recent times, the [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix:Binary prefix|binary prefix]] system was invented. So a kibibyte is 1024 bytes and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes. Still, the old way is interchangeable.
** Mac OS X Snow Leopard and recent versions of Ubuntu report space with each order of magnitude increasing every 1000.
** The old High Density 3.5-inch floppy disks were marketed as being "1.44 MB". Their actual storage capacity (before formatting) was neither 1.44 x 1000 x 1000 bytes, ''nor'' 1.44 x 1024 x 1024. It was 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 bytes, or 1440 Kilobytes.
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== Anime and Manga ==
* The first English dub of ''[[Dragonball 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!" [[Hand Wave|Perhaps]] Bulma is distinguishing years in an ordinary slower-than-light craft from years at ''c''.
* In ''[[Bleach]]'', Ryuken 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). But then Ishida ''is'' kind of a [[Glass Cannon]], [[Pun|so to speak]], and the area around a wound may have a [[Glass -Shattering Sound|resonant frequency]] that [[Hand Wave|he almost hit]].
 
 
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** The Kessel Run competition could just as well be, you've got X minutes/hours/days, let's see how far you'll get.
** It could just be that "parsec" means something completely different in the Star Wars universe and they are just homonyms.
** 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]]'' (referring to the two hundred thousand units being ready and a million more well on the way). Many assumed it referred to a military unit, and [[Flame War|took issue]] when it turned out to refer to [[Sci -Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|an individual clone]]. The thing is, it had always referred to an individual clone, even before the movie came out as the ''[[Attack of the Clones]]'' movie novelization (which came out about a month before the movie did) [[All There in the Manual|pretty much told us that "unit" referred to a unit of production]], and matched the "million more well on the way" statement with "a million clone warriors".
* 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...
* Used intentionally as a major plot point in ''[[This Is Spinal 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 18 feet (18'). This leads to "a Stonehenge monument on the stage that was in danger of being crushed by a dwarf."
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* 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.
* In ''[[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.
** [[Fridge Brilliance|Maybe his country is so poor the primary use of cars is to]] ''[[Schizo -Tech|plow fields]]''.
** Grampa Simpson hates the metric system. "My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
*** If you're curious, that's approximately 120,000 liters per 100 km (0.002 miles per gallon). It must be a Hummer.
**** Or a [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/:Crawler-transporter |crawler-transporter]] with a fuel leak (a fully functional crawler-transporter gets over 134 rods to the hogshead).
** 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.
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== Real Life ==
* In real life, the results of metric confusion can be very catastrophic and expensive, as when the Mars Surveyor '98 Orbiter crashed and was destroyed in 1999 -- the "small impulse" analysis software was giving data in pound-seconds, while the mission navigation team was expecting data in Newton-seconds.
* A more down-to-Earth example (no pun intended) was the [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider:Gimli Glider|Gimli Glider.]] The Boeing 767 C-GAUN was the first Air Canada jet with metric instrumentation. There already had to be a measurement conversion because the refueling people on the ground measured kerosene in volume (gallons), while the aircraft measured fuel in weight (pounds or kilograms). The ground crew used the wrong conversion factor in calculating how many gallons to pump on the plane, leading the crew to think the plane had 22,000 kilograms of fuel on board, the amount needed for the flight, when it only had 22,000 pounds (9979 kg). The exact mass of fuel used is very important to aircraft and thus the gauge could not be replaced with a car style unitless gauge.
** And in a supreme [[Guide Dang It]] (for the pilots/groundcrew)/WhatAnIdiot (for Air Canada) moment: ''nobody on the groundcrew or in the cockpit had been trained to do the proper conversion''.
*** This was primarily due to the fact that this kind of thing used to be the job of the flight engineer. Unfortunately, computerized jets like the Boeing 767 have eliminated the need for that position, and apparently no one at Air Canada had stopped to consider who should take over the FE's duties.
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* Precious metals are measured in troy pounds (373 g), which are divided into 12 troy ounces (31 g) -- standard ("avoirdupois") pounds (454 g) are divided into 16 ounces (28 g). (Hence, an ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers, but a pound of gold weighs less than an pound of feathers.)
** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI9w8g4UT2I This video] shows more examples of units with the same names but different values (e.g. short tons vs. long tons, statute miles vs. nautical miles vs. imperial nautical miles, etc.).
* There's a story about a guy from Indonesia who got fired from a multinational company because he measured an ounce as 100 grams and a pound as 500 grams, which resulted in years of equipment malfunctions. It turned out that [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_units_of_measurement:Dutch units of measurement|such units were once used in the Netherlands]] (called ''ons'' and ''pond''), and although they're not formally used anymore today, the guy's home country, that is a former Dutch colony, keeps teaching it at schools.
** Actually, they are still frequently used in the Netherlands.
** This is because at the time the metric system was introduced into the Netherlands (in the 19th century), the ons and pond were the Dutch equivalents of the English ounce and pound, with approximately the same weights. They were redefined in metric terms to ease the transition, but unlike some other such measures never really fell out of use, though they really only get used for day-to-day measuring. Even today, many people ask for things like "an ounce of minced meat" when they want 100 grams. Very, very few of them will know that such an ounce was ''not'' always 100 grams — including translators, who often translate the English word "ounce" with either "ons" or "100 grams", making the quantity over three times as big at a stroke. Oh yeah, and don't even try finding a translator who knows how big a fluid ounce is.
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Unit Confusion]]
[[Category:Trope]]
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