3248: 182.8 Meters
The article discusses the concept of false precision in measurements, particularly in the context of converting units. It highlights a humorous example involving the depth of a bay measured in fathoms and converted to meters. The piece emphasizes the importance of understanding the limitations of precision in casual measurements.
- ▪The depth of the bay was measured as greater than 100 fathoms, which converts to 182.8 meters.
- ▪Rounding down to 182.8 meters was done to avoid implying a false precision that could lead to incorrect statements.
- ▪The article illustrates how approximations in measurements can lead to misunderstandings when converted between different systems.
Explain xkcd files mainly under misc. We currently carry 6 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Explain xkcd |
| Canonical URL | https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3248:_182.8_Meters |
| Publication time | 2026-05-21T04:00:09Z |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T04:05:03.409Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T04:05:03.409Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | rCn8zNz8ArTP |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
182.8 Meters|<< Prev#3248 (May 20, 2026) Title text: They rounded down to 182.8 instead of rounding up to 182.9 because 182.9 might make the statement incorrect.|<< PrevRandom Explanation Explanation[edit] This is one of 45 incomplete explanations:This page was created recently by a 1.8288 meter high individual. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! This is a comic in the My Hobby series — the hobby here being reverse-engineering original units from oddly specific measurements in another unit. Unlike many of the My Hobby comics, where Cueball's hobby is something eccentric, prankish or dangerous, in this situation he uses his hobby simply to understand the origin of someone else's unusual phrasing.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Explain xkcd.
