xkcd #3138: Dimensional Lumber Tape Measure
Title text:
A person with two watches is never sure what time it is, especially if I got them one of the watches.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3138/
I had a client who wound up with one of those not realizing what it was, which caused him no end of problems until I ultimately figured it out confiscated it from him. He got a regular US inch one in exchange. I had to look it up at the time, too, because the notion of there being a Chinese knockoff inch that’s subtly inaccurate is one of those things that just seems so ridiculous on its face that it simply can’t be true, right? Except it totally is.
An Inch meant something different for most countries not too long ago. If the Chinese inch is a knockoff, then so is the US inch. Only the UK inch is the one truly inch!
Except it’s not. It’s simply a completely different and unrelated unit of measurement, which was dubbed colloquially in the west “Chinese inch”. Calling it a “Cinese knockoff inch” is like calling the yard a “US knockoff meter”.
I mean, that’s a valid assessment of the yard as well if you’re looking at it from a comedy perspective.
Yes, calling the yard a knockoff of the meter would be kind of funny, especially since it predates it by about a thousand years. And calling the cun a knockoff of the inch is similar, since it predates that by another thousand years.
Just like how Hydrox are just knockoff Oreos!