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LIFE IN GENERAL

How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your

Thumb
How far away is that building? That tree? There's an easy way to tell.

By Beth SkwareckiWednesday 2:00PM Comments (21) Alerts

Photo: Veranika848 (Shutterstock)

One of the most frustrating hobbies I ever took up was archery, but not because it’s
hard to hit a target on the wall (it is, but I got pretty good at that). My problem was
that one of the popular ways to go out and have fun with archery was to do “3D
shoots,” where you would have to shoot at a series of statues of animals, each
positioned at an unknown distance.

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How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your Thumb https://lifehacker.com/how-to-estimate-distance-using-just-your-thumb-...

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Estimating distance turned out to be my downfall. If you don’t have a good sense of
how far away the fake deer is, you’ll end up shooting way over its back or burying

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How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your Thumb https://lifehacker.com/how-to-estimate-distance-using-just-your-thumb-...

your arrow under the ground beneath its feet. At the time, I assumed that
estimating distance was less a learnable skill and more a gut feeling. Hence my
surprise when I recently came across a quick eyeball-and-mental-math trick that
allows anyone to estimate distance pretty accurately.

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The technique involves some gut-level estimation, but a much easier type. Then
you just multiply by 10. Here’s how it works:

1. Hold your thumb in front of you (with your arm fully outstretched), and close
one eye. Line up your thumb with an object whose size you have some sense of
(for example, a car).

2. Without moving your thumb, close your open eye, and open the other one.
Your thumb will appear to be in a different place.

1. Estimate how far your thumb “moved” relative to the object you’re looking at.
For example, a car is about 15 feet long, so if your thumb moved half a car
length, that’s about 7.5 feet.

2. Multiply by 10. In this example, you’d calculate that the car is about 75 feet
away from you.

Too good to be true? I walked around and tried it out. I also carried a laser
distance-finder and a tape measure with me to verify. One thing I noticed right
away is that I was tempted to measure the space in between my two thumb images;
instead, you need to measure from, say, the left side of the first thumb image to the
left side of the second thumb image.

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How to Estimate Distance Using Just Your Thumb https://lifehacker.com/how-to-estimate-distance-using-just-your-thumb-...

Standing in the kitchen, eyeballing the TV in the other room, I figured the TV was
somewhere between 3 and 4 feet wide, and that my thumb moved a little more
than half its distance, so about 2 feet. Calculation: TV must be 20 feet away. Laser
level says: 25 feet. OK, not bad.

From my desk to a nearby bookshelf, my thumb moved 6 inches, maybe a little

more. Calculation: 60ish inches. Actual measurement: 59 inches.

From a spot in my driveway to a garden shed: I turned my head and sideways to

measure against the height of the door. Thumb distance should be about 6 feet
(most of the height of the door), thus the shed must be 60 feet away. Actual
measurement: around 70 feet. Not perfect, but once again, not too far off.

The reason this trick is supposed to work is that the distance from your eye to your
thumb is about 10 times the distance from one eye to the other. I measured this,
too. Looking into the mirror with a measuring tape in front of my face, my pupils
are 2 and 5/16" apart, or 2.3 inches. The distance from the spot between my
eyebrows to my outstretched thumb is 23.5 inches. That’s a factor of 10.2,
impressively close to the 10 I was promised.

Bottom line: This trick isn’t going to give you a precise distance, but as a tool for
estimating, it actually kind of works! And by the way, if you ever need to estimate
how far away a deer-shaped statue is: a deer’s body length is roughly 5 feet.

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LIFE IN GENERAL

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12 SolutionsCost (//kinja.com/SolutionsCost) Beth Skwarecki

8/03/22 3:47pm
(//kinja.com/SolutionsCost)

This is one of the more useful posts. Pretty cool.

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1 Franky drinks Darjeeling tea (//kinja.… Bet…

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