Square Yards for Dummies (Metric System 1)

fabric comes in linear yards

It's said that a lot of Americans can't quite comprehend the metric system, though why a system of measures that leverages powers of ten; as opposed to 12, 3, 4, 16, 36, 8 and the like; confuses us. Many an American almost proudly wears a dunce cap when it comes to arithmetic. Like Barbie supposedly said, "Math is hard!" (she didn't, but that's another story). So when it comes to conversions between metric and imperial units, all bets are off. It becomes even worse when one of the units is "confusing,"as was apparently the case for eHow's Rose Kerr, seen holding forth on "How to Convert Square Meters to Linear Yards," now found at Sciencing.com (ptui!)

Unlike other eHowians who've taken a stab at the linear yards (and linear meters) question, Rose actually started off by defining a linear yard more or less correctly in her Demand Media-required introduction paragraph:

"Linear yard is a measurement of area in certain industries. For example, if you say that you bought 2 linear yards of 40-inch width fabric, it means that you bought a 40-inch by 72-inch piece." Yay, Rose! you're the first eHowian we've run across who noticed that linear yards are used in the fabric and flooring industries (and perhaps a few others). But what happened next clearly negates your success here. You see, once you'd mentioned that a linear yard includes a width component you should have run with it. But no, you then fell back on the tired old direct conversion: "Convert square meters to square inches. 1 meter = 39.3701 inches and 1 meter² = 1550.003 inches². So if you need to convert 1 square meter to 1 square inch, you have to multiply the value by 1550.003. For example, if you wish to convert 10 square meters to linear yards. First multiply 10 by 1550.003 for a result of 15500.03."

Why Kerr thought anyone working with fabric or flooring would need measurements out to three decimal places is beyond us, but we'll let her keep digging her hole:

"Convert the square inches value to yards. 36 inches = 1 yard. So to convert the square inches value into yards, divide the result by 36. For example, divide 15500.03 by 36. The result is 430.56."

OK, that's where Rose went off track. She attempted to convert area to length here, and that's not possible in a three-dimensional world. Instead, she needed to divide 15,500 by the number of square inches in a yard, 1296 – giving her a result of just less than 12 square yards. Reality check time, Rose: if a yard is slightly smaller than a meter, why would a square yard be 43 times the size of a square meter? Dumbass!

But there's more: Did you notice that, in her introduction, she mentioned the width of fabric ("40-inch width fabric")? So instead of dividing the number of square inches in a square meter by the number of square inches in a square yard, Rose should have been telling you to divide by the number of square inches in a yard of the fabric: for 50-inch fabric, the conversion factor would be 1440; for 54-inch fabric it would be 1944. You know what? when we see people saying dirt-stupid rubbish like that we can't wait to hand them a Dumbass of the Day award.

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MM - METRIC SYSTEM