Submitted by sean on

Dear Sean,
You stated the court size is 16' square... Are you sure? I am not an American and use the International Metric System - but when I converted it into my system the size is ridiculuously small. Not sure your math skills (we hear a lot about very low American education level here) - but 16' square is 4'x4' (about 1.2m each side!!!) and then divided further into four squares... means each square is 2'x2'... - can an American guy fit into this square at all??? Don't think so. Can you please look into it again, amend it and preferrably show International Metric System sizes. Thanks and regards from Sweden. - Luke, 6/17/2009

Dividing our 16-foot court (4.87 meters) into quarters yields four 8-foot squares (2.43 meters). Our fat, uneducated American people fit in their squares just fine.

Permalink

Submitted by Jason McG on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 11:26

The court Sean is describing is a 16' square, is 256 square feet, is ~24 square meters, or a little smaller then 5 meters along a side. My personal preference is a 4.47022124 × 10^-16 parsec diagonal square court (which is a .2 furlong perimeter court), surrounded by walls (which you can play off of), and littered with debris.

Of course, my preferred court is twice as wide as Sean's, and 64 times as large as Luke's Lilliputian League's locale.

Permalink

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 01:23

There is a difference between "feet square" and "square feet". "16' square" is read "sixteen feet square", which is 256 square feet *not* 16 square feet. Now about America's low education level... was it Sweden who figured out how to: sent people to the moon, create controlled nuclear reactions, sequence the entire human genome, transplant hearts, ... no, that would be America. Sweden figured out how to automate lighthouses.

Permalink

Submitted by sean on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 10:27

To be fair, we are talking about a square that measures 16 feet on each side. You are right to point out that the enclosed area is 256 feet.

Also, to be fair, space travel, nuclear energy, human genetics, etc, are all international collaborative efforts in science. Not to mention that Russian beat the US into space and the first sheep cloned in the US died a miserable early death, so...

Permalink

Submitted by Denis Towers (not verified) on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 18:09

Yes; that sounds pretty close to the size we use in Australia, except that we use tennis balls or 'bouncy balls' [almost tennis size]: thatfore, they move faster.
So each of the 4 squares is 7' X 7'.
In the English you have used, which is quite correct, that is an overall court size of 14' square - meaning about 196 square feet.

More Dear Sean