http://tvtropes.org/Main/UnitConfusion

Pearl: Y'all couldn't touch the Pearl if you trained for 100 million light-years!

Marina: Light-years are a unit of distance... Splatoon 2 Light-years are a unit of distance...

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.

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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:

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Anime and Manga

Comedy

Comedian Dr. Pete Ludovice has a routine where he suggests that men try to invoke Unit Confusion by reporting their penis size in nanometres. There is a joke where a woman is telling her friend about a guy's penis and claims it's 700 nanometres. The other woman is astonished that it's so small, but the first woman replies that the penis is that red (the wavelength of the color red is 620750 nm). Somewhat of a subversion—both use the same system of measurement, and it's used correctly, but the context was what was missing.

has a routine where he suggests that men try to invoke Unit Confusion by reporting their penis size in nanometres. In one of his routines, Tim Steeves opined that Americans think Canada is so cold because weather maps measure Canadian temperatures in Celsius and American in Fahrenheit, extrapolating that to a scenario where colonial explorers demarcated the border between the US and Canada because the temperature abruptly dropped forty degrees. note As it happens, Canadian weather reports actually give both measurements for the benefit of visitors from the United States and/or older folks who never got the hang of metric.

Comic Books

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 had been visiting Scrooge and, seeing he had an oral thermometer giving out a temperature of almost a hundred, went crazy with the frenzy of curing him from his tremendous fever. When Scrooge could finally get a word in, he pointed out she had wrongly assumed his thermometer gave the temperature in Celsius but it actually gave it in Fahrenheit. She demanded she thanked him for lowering his fever from almost a hundred to 37.

In the Dutch comic Heinz, the eponymous character asks what a light-year is, and the specialist responds that it is a year in which everything goes off without a hitch. This might be more of a malapropism, though.

This Invincible Iron Man panel gets the unit type right but royally screws up the SI prefix: a "picobyte" would be one trillionth of a byte. Must be really optimized code. Or a really ginormous character set! Osborn probably meant to say "petabyte" or 2 50 bytes.

Invincible Iron Man panel gets the unit type right but royally screws up the SI prefix: a "picobyte" would be one trillionth of a byte. Must be really optimized code. Or a really ginormous character set! Osborn probably meant to say "petabyte" or 2 bytes. 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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Comic Strips

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 moderate oven temperature, 350 degrees Celsius is much higher than most ovens can go, and 350 kelvins isn't even hot enough to boil water. Peter sarcastically suggested that he rotate the oven almost a full circle. "Don't be silly, Peter."

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."

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?")

Fan Works

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.

Films  Animated

Films  Live-Action

Literature

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Live-Action TV

Music

Artists: 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.

The Chris de Burgh song "A Spaceman Came Traveling" (a sci-fi interpretation of the first Christmas) explicitly refers to "light-years of time"; the writer not only makes the mistake but goes out of his way to wave it in the listener's face.

The Sparklehorse album Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain. Perhaps the mountain was hurtling through space. Songs: In the folk song "The Frozen Logger", the title character freezes to death when the temperature reaches "a thousand degrees below zero"; though no units of temperature are specified, there are no commonly used units that go that low. As the song is a Paul Bunyan-esque tall tale, this is entirely appropriate to its tone.

Radio

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".

Tabletop Games

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.)



Video Games

Web Animation

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.

Webcomics

Web Original

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 .

. Happens in universe in an SCP Foundation story. There is a big difference between mA and MA. Exactly how he managed to set the circuit to nine orders of magnitude lower than normal isn't given.

Western Animation

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 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.

Professor Farnsworth once claims that 1 pound of dark matter weighs as much as 10,000 pounds of normal matter. Pounds are units of weight, not volume: a pound of feathers weighs exactly the same as a pound of brick, it just takes up more space. Probably a Parodied Trope, though, given this is Futurama we're talking about.

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".

The protagonist of the children's cartoon Jimbo is a talking Jumbo-jet that was manufactured in centimetres instead of inches by mistake.

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.

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. 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: Kang: This is the best play in light-years.

Kodos: Light-years measure distance, not time.

Kang: You know what I meant.

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.

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 . Amethyst sort of corrects her by replying "light-years measure light, not years".

. Amethyst sort of corrects her by replying "light-years measure light, not years". 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.

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.

Real Life