Nominal Illusion

Per FreakOnomics
"the tendency for certain magnitudes to sound different when described in different units"

I'm sure you'll feel the same as what described in this article.

When Betsey got home from her morning run earlier this week, she beamed and told me she had covered eight kilometers. And this Sunday, after running the first two hours of my long weekend run, I gritted my teeth and told myself, “only five miles to go.”

The strange thing about these observations is that I’m an Aussie, and so typically talk in kilometers, while Betsey grew up in the United States, speaking in miles.

Why did we reverse roles? It turns out we were in very different situations. When I asked Betsey about her comment she said that, “ … measuring my run in kilometers makes it sound like I ran farther.” And this seems like something we may want to do once we are done jogging. In turn, I was still running when I described the last eight kilometers as five miles, and I did this because I was trying to convince my body that it didn’t have that much further to go.

* One mile is 1.6 kilometers

Like me, I am trying to "reach" a healthy weight. When I lost my first 5 kgs, I run around (ok, I called around AND only to my best friends) telling people I lost 10 lbs. Instead of 5 kg when really 1kg = 2.2 lbs. LOL. It just sounds so much better with TEN POUNDS!!! I do that quite often come to think about it. December is my brother's graduation and I am dying to go to Brisbane. What do I tell myself? Only 8 more months to go when I know freakin well that 8 months is a good 32 weeks on average. LOL.

One last example I have. A friend of mine who is I would say about 30++ weeks pregnant by now said

I've been with child for almost 30 weeks now, it's felt like forever already and it's not about to end soon either....I have 10 more weeks to incubate and feed this child with MY food.

Thirty weeks sounds like a very long time right? But if you do the math, the fetus is only 7 1/2 months old. If he would have been born then, he would be considered as a premie. So for my prego friend, please be a bit more patient ya? Because you have only 2 1/2 months left to "incubate" your baby! ;)