Square Units
The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.
The biggest I've seen in a published source in the wild is an 80-fold error in a reported distance, which I think came from a series of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.
In this comic, Megan is using her phone to read about an insect species that consumes (hyperbolically described as 'devours') one square inch of grass per day. As it is relayed through a chain of conversations, this measurement gets misinterpreted up to 12 times until Hairbun tells other people that it devours an area of grass equal to two times the land area of Australia per day, which is clearly impossible by one insect.[citation needed] This is similar to the premise of 2585: Rounding.
This gross error is the result of repeatedly misinterpreting the number of square units as the side length of a square, thus increasing the described area by the power of two. The chain also involves converting between imperial units and SI units, thus introducing smaller rounding errors, and frequently switching which measurement is "a single square with sides of a certain distance" and which is "the number of squares that are each of unit length". The upshot is that, while each statement has two (or more) roughly similar measurements of area, the chain of misunderstanding ends up escalating to ever larger relative expanses. The later participants in this chain also clearly forget to sanity-check their figures, blithely informing others that an individual insect is effectively consuming impossibly huge quantities of food, and traveling enormous linear distances every day to do so. In fact, assuming the insect could continuously eat a 1cm strip of grass, it would need to travel at (2,500 miles)2 / 1cm / 24 hours = 1.87×107 km/s, which is about 62 times the speed of light.
In the final frame, Blondie further misinterprets the comparative 'area of Australia' to mean the actual land mass of Australia, with the notional insect entirely defoliating the country twice a day, presumably of whatever had managed to grow within each 12 hour cycle. This would quickly kill off a large proportion of the vegetation, leading to a decreasing food supply for the insect.
The title text tells us that Randall once found an 80-fold error in a reported distance in a published source. However, it is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one. In imperial units, a mile is equal to 80 chains, but the 80-fold error was likely due to a different chain of at least three unit conversions and area/length misinterpretations.
Table of conversions
Dark red to light red shows a decrease in size due to inaccurate conversion, dark green to light green shows an increase in size.
Step Multiplier Total multiplier Square inch Square cm Square foot Acre Square meters Square kilometers Square miles 1 N/A 100% 1 6.4516 0.006945 1.594e-7 0.0006451 6.451e-10 2.490e-10 2 0.93 0.93 0.93 6 0.006458 1.482e-7 0.0006 6e-10 2.316e-10 3 6.00 5.58 5.58 36 (62) 0.03875 8.895e-7 0.0036 3.6e-9 1.39e-9 4 36.00 200.90 200.9 1,296 (362) 1.395 3.202e-5 0.1296 1.296e-7 5.004e-8 5 0.72 144.00 144 929.03 1 2.296e-5 0.09290 9.290e-8 3.587e-8 6 0.97 139.50 139.5 900 0.9688 2.224e-5 0.09 9e-8 3.475e-8 7 90,000.00 125,550.25 125,550.25 810,000 (9002) 871.9 0.02002 81 8.1e-5 3.127e-5 8 1.032 129,600 129,600 836,127 900 (302) 0.02066 83.61 8.361e-5 3.228e-5 9 90,000.00 1.1,66e+8 1.166e+8 7.525e+8 810,000 (9002) 18.59 7.525e+4 0.07525 0.02905 10 1.076 1.255e+8 1.255e+8 8.094e+8 871,200 20 8.093e+4 0.08093 0.03125 11 7,91e+6 9.920e+12 9.920e+12 6.4e+13 6.889e+13 1.581e+6 6.4e+9 (80,0002) 6,400 2,471 12 1.00 9.920e+12 9.920e+12 6.4e+13 6.889e+13 1.581e+6 6.4e+9 6,400 (802) 2,471 13 253,128 2.509e+16 2.509e+16 1.618e+17 1.7424e+14 4.000e12 1.619e+13 1.618e+7 6.250e+6 (2,5002) The total area of Australia is 7,688,287 km² or 2,968,464 mi², making it the 6th largest country on Earth by area. A 2,500-mile square would actually be about 2.1 times greater than the land area of Australia, once again having a rounding error.