Rule of Thumb - Distance ( EASY !!! ). No Math Needed

Hallo,
after watching some Videos about Messuring Distance with your Thumb ,
and they were all very out of Space Mathematic Rules that i didnt understand , i found an easyer way of doing it .
Hope it Helps .

[LaHandleAbhi]

Applying this trick, i figured out that i am 6.7 feet away from my angry wife

[Lt_Tragg]

I use a different technique but instead of distance I measure time until dark, something I’m learned as a pilot to calculate how much daylight remained. Simply extend an arm before you and set the edge index finger on horizon. Add fingers till you touch the bottom of the sun. Each finger equal 15 min. Eg, index finger and 3rd fingers between horizon and sun is 30 mins. Works very accurately. Granted if sun is obscured it does present challenges. Otherwise it’s a very quick calculation.

[davidignacio]

Man, you are hilarious. "All you need is a thumb. You can take a stick but a thumb, you always have a thumb with you. Just in case you do not have a thumb, just take a stick..." I like your content. This is very educational and at the same time entertaining.

[mikecobalt]

Years ago I noticed my Thumbnail was the same height as an "E Type" target at 300m, later on at an important test course I judged the distance of the target at 600m, I was taken back and grilled, almost expelled from the course before I explained my "Thumb/target" method, After a visiting SGM was called to supervise the situation I was given a "Pass" on that part and asked to explain the method again to the others (The target was exactly 600m). Good video.

[charlotteillustration]

I had only ever used the ‘rule of thumb’ as a measuring aid in art, I have never seen it used like this - how useful - thank you!

[garyglonek]

Thanks for that. The reason it works is because the distance to the thumb from your eye of the outstretched arm is approximately 10 times the distance between your pupils. This means that both measurements will have a ratio of one to ten, the distance being 10 times that of the width. The distance of the object is from the thumb, so for very close objects you would need to consider that.

[GFlCh]

This is a great tip. Keep in mind that different people may see more or less of a shift when alternating their view with each eye. The effect this has, is their multiplier may be different than yours (you used "multiply by 10" in the video), but it should still be proportional so it should still work. For example, when I do this, the "shift" I see is perhaps considerably more, so the multiplier, for me, should be less, perhaps 7 or 8 rather than 10.

A person can figure out their "personal multiplier" either by:

1) Trial and error repeating the process trying different multipliers until you find the most accurate multiplier, or

2) By pacing off say 100m from an object (tree) and setting a pole or tall stake marking your second "thumb-view" (a second person can help with this), then measure the separation of the tree to the pole (say it was 9m), and calculate the multiplier as the "tree-distance" divided by the "offset-distance", in this example, it would be 100 / 9, so the multiplier would be about "11". If the "offset-distance" measured 14m, it would be 100 / 14 and the multiplier would be about "7".

[SuperNova-socj]

I was taught a similar technique as a sawyer, but it was for finding where a tree would land when you fell it.
You take a stick the length of your arm and hold it out at arms length, then get it so the top of your hand is at the spot you're going to do your cut and walk from the tree to where the tree and the stick look like the same height and thats where the top of your tree will fall.

[gengis]

Additional tip: You can use an height to guess a width in a distance.
Target a person (5-6 ft) or an house (10 ft per floor) with a stick. Visualize the height of your target from the top of the stick to your finger. Take your landmarks with each eye. Then turn the stick horizontally and measure how many "heights" you have between the two landmarks. The distance is the height x number of heights x 10.
For example I target an house of two stores with no roof (20 ft). Closing each eye, I have two landmarks. Using the stick, I measure they are apart by 3 heights of the house. So the distance from me is 20 ft. x3 x10 = 200 yards.
Of course the greater the distance the bigger the inaccuracy.

[spinafire]

What's great about this tip is that it works with any unit. You could use it to approximate miles, meters, or even feet of difference, because the ratios will always be the same. It only relies on a strong ability to estimate the distance between the two positions of your thumb in whatever unit you prefer.

[rufus-hh]

Very interesting. I never thought of using one eye, and then the other, but this is calculating based on trigonometry. You make a triangle from the tree to one eye, and then the other. You estimate the difference between the tree (as seen by the first eye) and the position in line with your thumb with the second eye. I didn't know about multiplying it by ten to estimate the distance. The pace count is taught by the US Army to follow a map. You pace off 100 meters so that you know how many paces to walk a certain distance. Thanks for an interesting and informative video.

[В.А.Никитин-ъж]

Thats amazing! I've checked it with the building outside my window and then measured with the sattilite map - absolute accuracy on 700 meters! Thanks a lot!

[DISCODAN]

And so goes the expression… “rule of thumb”!! I honestly never questioned that saying, I always knew it just meant an estimate, and was simply an old expression! Cheers to you!

[righteousindignation]

I was taught this in the Royal Air Force. Very handy. It’s a life skill more people should know. It’ll help if you’re lost and need to call search and rescue

[GB-rbup]

Thanks for the informative video. This is called a parallax. It's how creatures with stereo vision can perceive depth. Scientists also use a more complex version of this method to determine the distance to objects in the sky, like stars and planets.

[ernestpaniagua]

I was taught this in the US Army by a old Vietnam veteran who was my platoon Sgt back in 88

[jasleenkour]

You explained it really well.
I somehow yesterday saw somebody explaining it, but didn't get it at all.
Thank you.

[-SimonRiley]

Instead of metres, steps can also work. Just see how many steps away the distance between the thumb and the object might be and multiply it by 10. In this case the tree and the stick/thumb were ~3 steps away from each other so it took you 30 steps to reach there 😊

[robames]

This works really well over short distances where you can accurately estimate the distance on the ground between both sightings. Estimating that distance eg between two trees with no reference is more difficult. The presence at that distance of a known measurement eg a person or a cow etc greatly helps.

[jdee]

That was amazing! And I'm glad nature was so kind that the number was 10x instead of some other more complex number. Almost as if it was done on purpose.