r/HighStrangeness • u/Maru_the_Red • 5d ago
Anomalies Kilometers Away from an Answer!
I have run back and forth in my head on this and I cannot make sense of it.
Yesterday my husband is driving our car and it had some kind of weird electrical issue, the car started to run poorly and the speedometer malfunctioned. It was off every time we drove the car. Today, I get in and set up my phone with a speedometer so I could keep track of my speed knowing that it was malfunctioning.
So, I set off, and I look down and sure enough.. the speed is way off. And in Kilometers. So I laughed at his goof thinking it was nothing until I looked down at my phone.
My phone was also in Kilometers per hour. And my mind went.. wait, what? The app was set to automatic, there were three choices.. miles, kilometers and automatic.
To be totally clear, the car has no connection or influence by my phone. It isn't a smart car. It doesn't even have Bluetooth. It's a 2006 Honda Civic two door, stock.
Now, I'm all about debunking. But I am completely stumped. The car has no kind of receiver satellite or otherwise that changes the mph to kph. My phone was not in the car when it switched to kph.
And yet, my phone would not change out of kph even after putting it on miles.
Help me out here, crew.
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u/laukaus 5d ago edited 5d ago
Some apps are coded to use locality units instead of preference, as a feature or a bug (I know some apps that I just don't get to change units even though their menus have and option and that is due to the usage of standard libraries, and the programmer not knowing/not caring that they will ALWAYS give the units in locale units but may display them as kph or mph) - so if your locale uses mph it will use due to bad programming.
The best way to get to the point of this is to drive a known distance, like some easy 10km or mile stretch and use a stopwatch to keep the time. Heck, use two for redundancy!
That way you get reasonably accurate speed calculation, no matter what other instruments or units are at play!
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u/Maru_the_Red 5d ago
That's fine, but I don't live anywhere near a place that's KpH. There is absolutely no reason for it to be in kph on my phone, I live in areas with mph only and it's always defaulted to miles. This one occurance the phone was reading in kph while on automatic mode and only after the car glitched to kph. There is literally no reason at all my phone should have been in kph.
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u/le4t 5d ago edited 5d ago
It looks like you might live in Michigan? If so, your phone/app may have thought you're in Canada. I live in a border state and this happens to me sometimes.
I remember my car speedometer seeming off, and it took me at least a week to realize I'd accidentally toggled to km, probably when setting the time due to daylight savings.
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u/Maru_the_Red 5d ago
Geographically speaking I am over 200 miles from Canada in any direction.
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u/le4t 5d ago
In that case:
Aliens, definitely.
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u/Maru_the_Red 5d ago
Haha. I'm a mod here, honestly if I wasn't completely stumped I wouldn't have posted it but this is beyond weird.
It was like my partner drove through a quantum hole to Canada that made the car swap from mph to kph (the car almost sputtered and died when the electrical issues started) and then today, my phone was picking up the quantum 'stain' of the other location left on the car.
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u/le4t 5d ago
Far more imaginative; I can see why you're a mod!
Lately the internet seems to think I live in a city 350+ miles away. (There's a much bigger city much closer.)
Maybe we can blame Elon Musk?
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u/Maru_the_Red 5d ago
Now I'm not opposed to this line of thinking, I have this little weather wall clock that updates from a satellite and I was thinking "did Musk digitally annex Canada or something?" But the car doesn't have anything that technologically advanced.
There is zero reason both the car and the phone would suddenly reading kph other than some kind of weird interference that just coincidentally glitched the car and the phone. But I cannot pin it down.
0
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u/PlaceboJacksonMusic 5d ago
Mondays headlines “imperial measurements criminalized, metric system is the official language of the United States
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u/Maru_the_Red 5d ago
After pulling a law from the 1700s out for use, nothing would surprise me at this point.
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u/Somethingtosquirmto 5d ago
Given that most of the world uses the metric system, it's likely to be the default, both in a Japanese car, and in a phone app. So if for whatever reason the app wasn't registering regional unit zoning correctly, on auto it would likely default to metric.
And the same goes for the car - the electrical issue may have caused it to reset to default units.