[HN Gopher] The metre originated in the French Revolution
___________________________________________________________________
The metre originated in the French Revolution
Author : Tomte
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-05-23 15:43 UTC (1 days ago)
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| skrebbel wrote:
| > (It was later found the astronomers were a bit off in their
| calculations, and the metre as we know it is 0.2 millimetres
| shorter than it should've been.)
|
| That's actually impressively good accuracy for the time! Hats off
| to the astronomers.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I was just about to post same quote but you beat me to it.
|
| I'd go further, I think their work was a remarkable feat for
| the late 1790s. That they achieved that accuracy given the
| primitive equipment of the day says much for their abilities
| and understanding.
|
| Also at the time France was in turmoil, numbers of its
| scientists were victims of the French Revolution--Antoine
| Lavoisier, probably the greatest chemist of his time--was
| beheaded by guillotine in 1794, so the political environment
| was anything but stable.
|
| Look back 225+ years ago: there was no electricity, no material
| science to speak of to make precision instrumentation--journal
| bearings on lathes, etc. couldn't be made with the accuracy of
| today, backlash would have been a constant worry. All
| instrumentation would have been crafted by hand.
|
| And the old French pre-metric system of units was an imperial
| system similar to the British (France even had an inch that was
| similar in length to British Imperial unit). All
| instrumentation up to that point would have relied on the less
| precise standards of that old system.
|
| Traveling was by horse and sailing ship, and so on. Surveying
| would have been difficult. There wasn't even the electric
| telegraph, only the crude optical Chappe telegraph, and even
| then it was only invented in the 1790s and wasn't fully
| implemented during the survey.
|
| They did a truly excellent job without any of today's high tech
| infrastructure but they made up for all these limitations by
| being brilliant.
|
| In today's modern world we often underestimate how inventive
| our forefathers were.
| selkin wrote:
| The pre-metric measurements in France weren't imperial, but
| local: units had the same name, but different cities defined
| them differently. A livre[0] in one village was almost, but
| not quite, the livre used by the one only a couple toise[1]
| away.
|
| [0] about a modern pound, depending where you were.
| Toulouse's livre was almost 1.3 modern pounds, for example.
|
| [1] about 13853/27000 meter.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| You're right, I should have put 'imperial' in quotes as
| it's not the same as the British Imperial measurement.
| You'll note however I did distinguish the French system
| from the British one by referring to it in lowercase, that
| was intentional.
|
| The issue came up in a round about way on HN several weeks
| ago and I should have been more careful here because I
| wasn't precise enough in my comment then. As I inferred in
| that post 'imperial' nomenclature is used rather loosely to
| refer to measurement and coinage/currency as they're often
| closely linked (in the sense that the 'Crown' once
| regulated both).
|
| Pre-revolution French coinage used the same 1/12/20 number
| divisions as did the old English LSD and currencies in
| other parts of Europe, and that system is often referred to
| as 'imperial' coinage which likely goes back to _Roman
| Imperial Coinage_ -- but to confuse matters it was decimal.
|
| One can't cover the long historical lineage here except to
| mention the sign for the Roman [decimal] denarius is 'd'
| which is also used for the LSD penny, 12 of which make the
| shilling (PS=240d).
|
| So for various reasons both 'old' physical measurement and
| 'old' coinage are often referred to as (I)imperial. To add
| to the confusion, modern currencies when converting from
| LSD/1/12/20 to metric and '1/12... measurement' are often
| done around the same time. Nomenclature overlaps.
|
| For example, I'm in Australia and the 1966 conversion from
| LSD to metrified coinage occurred shortly before the
| metrication of measurement. It was all lumped together as
| _Imperial (note u /c) to Metric_ (that's how the public
| perceived it). The Government staged both changeovers close
| enough so that the reeducation of the citizenry wasn't
| forgotten by the time the measurement program started.
|
| For the record here's part of _length_ in the old French
| measurement system:
|
| _" Pied du Roi (foot) [?] 32.48 cm (Slightly longer than
| an English foot, which is about 30.48 cm.)
|
| Pouce (inch) = 1/12 of a pied [?] 2.707 cm
|
| Ligne = 1/12 of a pouce [?] 2.256 mm
|
| Toise [?] 1.949 metres (A toise is 6 pieds.) <...>"_
|
| The other units can be found on the same site:
| https://interessia.com/medieval-french-measurements/
| selkin wrote:
| I think I wasn't clear about the point I was trying to
| make, because your comment seems unrelated to it.
|
| Pre-metrification there wasn't a French unit system, like
| we think about those today, where a meter in Paris is the
| same meter used in Limoges. The actual length of a ligne
| changed from one region to the next. There was no country
| wide standard of exactly how much a certain unit is. Such
| standards were regional, at best, sometimes the regions
| being as small as a single village.
|
| This is one of the most important results of the French
| resolution: a consistent system of measurements,
| regardless of the units chosen for it.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right. Essentially, before the Enlightenment systems of
| weights and measures didn't exist in the standardized way
| we know it today--measurements traceable to
| national/international standards, etc.
|
| That's not to say local standards--let's call them
| weights and measures--weren't strictly adhered to and
| enforced. They were. There are many recorded instances
| from history to illustrate the point from, say,
| Archimedes' eureka moment to that of the obsessive and
| overzealous Issac Newton+ when Warden of the Royal Mint
| was roaming around London checking for clipped coins and
| bringing the perpetrators to justice.
|
| I'm fiercely pro-metric, and I've had much to say on the
| matter on HN over the years. So I'm used to the guns
| coming out from those in the US defending the Imperial
| system. I've good reason, at school I learned the
| Imperial system, CGS and MKS (it was before SI). In say
| physics learning to do things fluently in three different
| systems was a recipe for mistakes and confusion.
|
| At the risk of repeating myself (link below), learning
| foot poundals, dynes and Newtons was bad enough but to
| have to convert between them in exams really was pretty
| rotten. The other reasons I've also menrioned, I've sat
| on standards committees and have writtern standards
| (nothing as illustrious as the ISO but it was for an
| intergovernmental organization nonetheless). Writing
| standards is often a tedious thankless task (I don't have
| to tell you people don't read them for the fun of it).
|
| The link below is me getting worked up on HN over the
| metric system over a number of rolling posts, and it's
| not the first. I've referred to it here more for the sake
| of completeness than anything else. (I don't like
| rereading my old posts so I don't expect others to do
| so.)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=43880977
|
| + Newton. Not exactly weights and measures but a well
| documented case:
| https://coinsandhistoryfoundation.org/2021/04/30/sir-
| isaac-n...
| saalweachter wrote:
| The US doesn't use the Imperial system, it uses US
| customary units.
|
| They're similar but very different.
|
| An Imperial pint is 568 ml; a US pint is 473.
|
| An Imperial hundredweight is 112 lbs. A US hundredweight
| is 100.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The meter was also a bit of a gimmick, definitionally --
| they wanted a unit that was about three (French/Paris)
| feet, but a definition that wasn't "my personal
| yardstick" so everyone would agree to it.
|
| So they played around with various definitions like the
| 2-second pendulum, until they found one which worked and
| produced a single indisputable length.
|
| (As opposed to picking something fundamental which was
| unrelated to previous units. Eg (not that they could have
| derived it at the time), the hydrogen line, the
| wavelength of the 1420MHz watering hole frequency, is
| human scale at about 21cm/8.3 inches, fundamental
| throughout the universe, and unrelated to previous
| units.)
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| There was a 12:1 ratio between the foot ' inch '' line '''
| and point '''' in pre-decimal engineering. Yes, they used
| triple prime marks. The typographic point was originally
| 1/144th of an inch. Watches are typically measued in french
| _pointes_.
| batisteo wrote:
| Have you read the novel Le rendez-vous de Venus by Jean-
| Pierre Luminet? If not you might love ite
| throwanem wrote:
| Yeah, I know. That's why I make fun of it some times. Not because
| it is French; though an American I hope I am not a damned
| ungracious American, and though I believe we may fairly call the
| original debt squared after Normandy, I recognize and respect the
| generous Gallic heart from which it sprang.
|
| But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the
| happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at
| human discretion, while the similar and simultaneous effort at
| decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually
| takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun. Both
| efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to
| prescribe a shape to which reality must conform, and thus may
| come in for about equal gentle contumely on that score.
| Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly
| misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale.
| They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way.
| Zanfa wrote:
| You mean like my feet aren't a foot long, my thumb isn't an
| inch? Ironically, my pinky is a centimeter thick and a meter is
| when I take a long step.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| The width of my palm (with my thumb, tightly pressed to it)
| at its widest is 10 centimeters, which is quite handy.
|
| Oh, and my "inch" is almost exactly 3 centimeters.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| There's a couple of convenience approximations I use to
| work with US Imperial..
|
| 30cm is a "metric foot" (it's actually even closer to 1
| light nanosecond which is kinda cool for thinking about
| distances at computer speeds)
|
| 250ml is a "metric cup"
| throwanem wrote:
| And now the famous triviality of order-of-magnitude and
| unit conversion goes entirely out the window...
| coxmi wrote:
| That's where duodecimal comes in...
| throwanem wrote:
| Duodecimal metric! Tell me more.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Speaking of feet - I got irritated when buying shoes and
| trying to convert shoes sizes.
|
| It turns out that UK/US sizes are based on the length of
| a barley corn.
|
| Quite why it isn't just in centimetres is baffling.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
| throwanem wrote:
| I'll give you this one, but only with the qualification
| that inches would be fine too. There's no benefit to the
| manufacturers in more rational standardization, though.
| As with women's clothing sizes, why would Levi's (for
| example) make it _easier_ for me to find something that
| matches my style and budget, from anyone other than them?
| Hell, even men 's sizes which nominally _are_ in inches
| do this! I have to go a size up in Levi 's vs Wranglers
| because Levi's size small, the bastards, while Lee mostly
| run true to size but none of their cuts is really worth
| wearing. And don't even _talk_ to me about boot sizes!
|
| Inches vs. centimeters? Baby stuff. Get on _my_ level. :D
| lrasinen wrote:
| I usually go with 240 ml if scaling down and there are
| fractions involved for slightly cleaner numbers.
|
| Another "close enough" value is the binary inch of 25.6
| mm. Makes dealing with /32s and /64s oh so much easier.
| steamrolled wrote:
| The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better"
| than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of
| reference and then made almost all the other units related to
| that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of
| prefixes.
|
| In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit,
| except for consistency for international standards and trade.
| But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is
| simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between
| liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.
|
| And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use
| inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is
| anchored to SI.
| kergonath wrote:
| > And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes
| use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is
| anchored to SI.
|
| Inches are defined relative to the SI as well.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| As are Fahrenheit degrees.
| throwanem wrote:
| I don't know why people seem to think this is an "own."
| throwanem wrote:
| Even when we use inches, they're frequently themselves
| metricated via division by 1,000 to produce the "thou." This
| is an extremely strong convention; I have one (inexpensive)
| digital caliper that can read in fractional inches, but every
| such tool I own reads in both millimeters and thou.
|
| I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is so
| humanist seem never to have noticed which of their finger
| joints is an inch long. For me that's the second of the
| little finger, but I have large squarish peasant hands. As
| for the rest, treating a centimeter as 10/25 of an inch and
| vice versa seems to work well enough for measurements not
| requiring particular precision, or in other words anything
| I'd be comfortable doing without a caliper. Where's the
| trouble, really?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Where does the 'humanist' bit end?
|
| Should we go back to fathoms, furlongs, chains, drams and
| bushels?
|
| This was settled a long time ago for the vast majority of
| the word.
| throwanem wrote:
| If we should find they serve us better, why not?
| nancyminusone wrote:
| >bushels
|
| Someone hasn't been to an apple orchard recently.
| bregma wrote:
| It's far more impressive to express gravity in units of
| stone furlong per fortnight squared. It's 7.14 x 10^10.
| Makes gravity on Jupiter look puny.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's that plus or minus about three orders, sure.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Just for fun, check the yojana and related Indian
| measures:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojana
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_measurement_sy
| ste...
| throwanem wrote:
| Now, ironically given I'm for all serious purposes an
| English monoglot, you're speaking my language. Give me
| lakh and crore! Give me weights and measures where I can
| _feel_ the history. Just like my mad 5,280-foot
| (1,360-yard) mile, which I love.
|
| And give me also the precise rational tenths-and-tens
| units, too, of course, for when we need accuracy more
| than soul. I work in thou all the time! All I've really
| been saying is, there's a place in the world for both
| ways of doing things. Why's everyone else so hellbent on
| having exactly one or the other?
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Ah the joys of units! If you work cross-discipline,
| 1/1000th of an inch is called a 'thou' in machining. For
| PCBs (not unheard of to attach the two together), the same
| unit is called a 'mil'. Not to be confused with millimeter,
| even though it often is confused.
| int_19h wrote:
| > I do think it's funny all these folks insisting metric is
| so humanist seem never to have noticed which of their
| finger joints is an inch long.
|
| People who grow up with metric instead notice which of
| their fingers is ~1 cm thick.
| throwanem wrote:
| "Instead." Still we have the assumption of exclusivity. I
| remember broader minds here. What happened?
| bregma wrote:
| > In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit
|
| That's not entirely true. An American driving across the
| Canadian border on an interstate can automatically go from 55
| to 100. That's almost twice as much.
| throwanem wrote:
| No it isn't. Our speedos are denominated both ways, it's
| cheaper, and I drive a Nissan with a V6 and paddle
| shifters. Not that that's much in any real sense! But
| neither is a Piper Archer, and those _also_ have enough
| power to make 100kph feel extremely tame. It 's not a high
| bar, is what I'm saying.
| kergonath wrote:
| > But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the
| happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at
| human discretion
|
| What do you mean exactly? Any distance is divisible
| arbitrarily, it's a continuous scale regardless of the unit
| system. We could define the metre as a foot (or rather, as the
| distance of some physical phenomenon close enough to a foot)
| and build a decimal system out of it, and it would have the
| same advantages as the metric system.
|
| > while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing
| time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth
| to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun
|
| The fact that there are 60 seconds in an hour and 24 hours per
| day has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly the earth
| revolves. Your argument works (kinda) for the number of days in
| a year, that's all.
|
| > Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human
| desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform
|
| No, this is completely backwards. This effort originates from
| the idea that we should observe and understand nature, and
| build a rational society based on this understanding. The
| original metre was a fraction of the length of a meridian for a
| reason. They did not change the size of the Earth to conform to
| an arbitrary unit. Instead they came up with a unit that made
| sense to them, for both philosophical and practical reasons.
| They did the opposite of what you say.
|
| > Especially since, in another example of its designers'
| foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the
| human scale
|
| The metre is about 2 thirds of an average human height (give or
| take, the average also changed with time). How is that not a
| human scale? If you want to go lower, to the scale of something
| you can hold, you have centimetres. If you want to go larger,
| to the scale of a distance you can walk, you have kilometres.
| And all conversions and comparisons spanning the 5 orders of
| magnitude relevant to our daily lives are seamless and make
| sense. What is your problem with this system?
|
| > They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way
|
| That is actually hilarious. The enlightenment philosophers and
| humanists who came up with the metric system are polar
| opposites of the brutalists. They rationalised our
| understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it
| square.
| throwanem wrote:
| > They rationalised our understanding of the world around us.
| They did not rebuild it square.
|
| This is a distinction without a difference. Read James C.
| Scott, for pity's sake.
| kergonath wrote:
| Well, no. I am not going to go through a collection of
| books by a random guy because someone said so on the
| Internet. If you can articulate the point you want to make,
| maybe. If the point cannot be made, I am not sure why I
| should be interested.
| throwanem wrote:
| The short version is that you have this entirely backward
| and the "rationalizing" you describe not only remakes the
| world but does so by means of gruesome violence, and it
| is no accident the twitchy, haunted neurotics who
| attached their numericalizing madness to the Red Terror,
| had to go to such hideous lengths to get themselves taken
| at all seriously. We are not required to do the same two
| hundred years on, simply because they happen to have been
| on the side that wrote the history.
|
| The long version is _Seeing Like a State._
| olau wrote:
| Seeing like a state does not argue against the meter
| system.
|
| It just explains that many of these things got traction
| despite the resistance against them only because the
| state needed them.
|
| In the case of measurement units, one was that the
| natural units varied in size and could be gamed, which is
| a big problem for fair tax collection.
| throwanem wrote:
| I don't suppose I expected to need to clarify the
| difference between citing a work whose thesis informs my
| own, and quoting from a work where my thesis is actually
| stated. But it now being evident I was optimistic: This
| is the _first_ one.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > metric offers no units at the human scale.
|
| How do you apply this to the imperial system?
|
| I've heard this criticism before, but limited to temperature,
| with people saying they want more increments. I'm not sure why
| half a degree centigrade is so hateful.
| throwanem wrote:
| Fahrenheit has finer divisions at the human scale, yes. A
| scale calibrated to the boiling point of water, at the top
| end, can tell me nothing useful about my environment beyond
| the manner in which it has probably killed me.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| If Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because the units are
| smaller, doesn't that mean that the kilometre is better
| than the mile because it has smaller units?
|
| It is _all_ subjective. You like what you grew up with
| because it is _familiar_ , not because it is better. You
| know by rote memorisation how much 100 feet is and what 75F
| feels like, the same way I know by rote memorisation how
| much 50 meters is and what 25C feels like.
| throwanem wrote:
| Show me where I have at any time argued one system is
| _better_ than the other, as opposed to precisely that
| _no_ system is strictly preferable, and I 'll answer this
| point. Until then I can't and thus also won't.
|
| In the meantime your grasp of nuance or lack thereof is
| no pressing concern of mine. And my entire thesis has
| been flagrantly subjective throughout, save where the
| minor matter of relevant history is involved. To attempt
| to answer this with the charge of subjectivity, as though
| to do so accomplished other than to recapitulate what has
| been obvious all day, seems not only pointless but
| risible.
| lrasinen wrote:
| It's the other end of the scale that's very relevant in
| northern latitudes (Celsius was Swedish, after all).
| Negative temperatures => it's freezing.
|
| A very common morning coffee table discussion (translated
| from Finnish):
|
| "What's the weather like?" "Plus all day" "Kids, wear your
| Gore-Tex shoes to school"
| jeltz wrote:
| Celsius is the clearly more human scale. Zero is when water
| freezes which is very useful of you live where it is cold.
| Lakes freeze, snow does not melt and the ground gets icy so
| you have to be careful when you walk and drive. It is also
| useful when storing food. And 100 degrees is useful when
| cooking.
|
| For other measueres you may have a point but Celsius is
| defined around very useful points. Water is very important
| to us humans.
| Mikhail_Edoshin wrote:
| A page of 8.5 x 11 units is more convenient to divide into
| parts than that of 210 x 297 units.
| throwanem wrote:
| Yes, working to US letter size in my book blocks makes for
| fewer headaches over the guillotine cutter, whose scale is
| only graduated in 1/16 inches (0.0625", ~1.5mm) and whole
| millimeters. Oh, the wasted 20 thou would get cleaned up in
| the face finishing cut, but all the same, half an inch is a
| much more convenient quantum here than half a millimeter.
| az09mugen wrote:
| Another fun fact dating from French revolution is the 10 hour-
| day, each hour had 100 minutes and each minutes 100 seconds :
| https://historyfacts.com/world-history/fact/france-had-a-cal...
| paulorlando wrote:
| Fun fact... or not so fun?
|
| For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal
| time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10
| day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the
| loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
|
| Here's an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by
| the elimination of Sunday:
|
| "'The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to
| church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips ... they
| met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the
| county town, whom they enjoyed seeing ... there then followed a
| meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one
| relative or another....' But if that was the way it was for the
| old ladies, what did Sunday mean to 'young girls, whose blood
| throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!' We can well
| understand their impatience, 'they waited for each other at the
| start of the road they shared,' they danced.
|
| "Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, 'the men were
| left to the devices they always had:' the old men went to the
| tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived
| of their 'lovely village girls', they quarrelled. As for the
| women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were
| miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out
| of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the
| need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces...
| there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very
| hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their
| unmarried state: 'in all regions the pleasure of love is the
| greatest pleasure.'"
|
| - from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the
| Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
| thrance wrote:
| I know the real goal of the republican calendar was to
| undermine the Church's power by making it so Sundays would
| fall at random days of the week, and also screw over the
| workers by leaving them with a worse weekend-to-week ratio.
|
| However, all I ever read about this part of the revolution
| seems to indicate that people just didn't comply and went to
| church anyway on Sundays, and also didn't work that day. On
| that account, I feel likr your quote is kind of partisan.
| People wouldn't have been left lost and aimlessly drinking on
| their tenth day because of a lack of God, because they never
| quit going to church!
| paulorlando wrote:
| Not sure I understand what you mean. At least, I thought
| that (most? all?) the churches were closed for the worst
| part of the French Revolution aftermath.
|
| For example, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other
| Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the
| new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be
| celebrated. It didn't last long. Hard to create a new
| religion quickly. Maybe some echoes of recent history
| there.
| thrance wrote:
| It was much more nuanced than that, and the vast majority
| of the French people stayed Christian during the period.
| Also, keep in mind the revolution was mostly a Paris
| thing, the rest of the country was left relatively
| unaffected at first.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_Franc
| e_d...
| paulorlando wrote:
| Is the difference "stayed Catholic" vs the churches had
| to close?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Pretty sure it mattered when and where you were. Armies
| and militias were sent to put down defiant regions who
| had set up their own armies and militias in order to keep
| the Revolution out.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| Ya, Vendee really protests too much
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sowjetischer_Revolutionskal
| e... did the divide and conquer of people better by
| asigning them non overlapping weekends by colour
| jacquesclouseau wrote:
| inb4 we still have the 8 hour workday
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Sadly, the 100 day year never worked quite right.
| thrance wrote:
| No but they had a clean year of 12 months, 30 days each (3
| ten-day weeks) plus 5/6 holiday days at the end of the
| calendar (around the September equinox).
|
| Also, the months were given names by a Poet, and the days had
| minerals, vertues or plants instead of Saints. The calendar
| itself was pretty cool.
|
| Honestly, if they had 5 weeks of 6 days each instead of the 3
| weeks of 10 days, I'd even call it the perfect calendar.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| Might I introduce you to visions of what could have been:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform
| tempestn wrote:
| Better would be an even more fundamental change: instead of
| trying to standardize everything on base 10, recognize that
| base 8 or 16 is much more convenient in both computing and
| everyday life, and standardize around that.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Historically, the most convenient are numbers with large
| numbers of factors.
|
| 60 can be split into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30
| evenly for example
|
| The other number that accomplishes this is 12: 2, 3, 4, 6
| are all factors.
|
| That's why 12 and 60 are so common for real life systems.
| andrepd wrote:
| Definitely not, but very composite numbers are! Like 6,
| 12, 24, or the best of them all, 60.
| linguistbreaker wrote:
| I hadn't heard of this and it's fun to think about.
|
| It's 100,000 s/day as opposed to our current 86,400 s/day which
| is not far off.
|
| Hours, however, were twice as long.
|
| They had time pieces that displayed both together.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Their seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise
| they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very
| annoying for any kind of scheduling I'd imagine.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Yes. Obviously.
|
| Or more to the point: since they had no use for
| milliseconds at that time, their milliseconds would have
| been 86.4% of standard milliseconds.
| bonzini wrote:
| It also messes up the original proposal for defining the
| meter, which predated the revolution and was "the length of
| a pendulum with a period of 2 seconds" (i.e. the pendulum
| would be at its lowest point once per second). Which is
| ironic considering that the meter was also adopted during
| the revolution, though with a definition not based on the
| length of a pendulum).
| raattgift wrote:
| Latitude, mass concentrations, and climate also messed
| with the half-period/metre ("seconds pendulum")
| definition; with increasing frequency precision, one
| would need an almanac, an accelerometer, and probably
| other tools. Additionally, stabilizing the length of the
| pendulum under environmental conditions was already known
| to be tricky, with materials science unable to produce
| reasonably low thermal-expansion rods prior to the 20th
| century.
|
| Consequently, the seconds-pendulum/metre relationship
| gets in the way as one might want to go to sub-millimetre
| length precision for parts made in different locations or
| at different times of the day or year. Precision copies
| of a prototype was more reliable in practice.
|
| (In practice we mostly still generate precise and
| accurate physical artifacts and make copies from those,
| it's just that there one can in principle generate such
| an artifact just about anywhere and anywhen, calibrating
| with (for example) interferometry <https://iopscience.iop
| .org/book/edit/978-0-7503-1578-4/chapt...>)
|
| Finally, the Trinity Clock <https://clock.trin.cam.ac.uk/
| main.php?menu_option=theory> is a neat examination of a
| well known pendulum clock that's surprisingly accurate
| (if not really precise; it's been reliably accurate to
| within two seconds over the course of a month for a very
| long time, but it's not going to give you a 10MHz sine-
| wave, and it's not a good for disciplining an oscillator
| which does so). Do check out the various plots.
| bonzini wrote:
| > Latitude, mass concentrations, and climate also messed
| with the half-period/metre ("seconds pendulum")
| definition
|
| Probably not by 15% which was the difference between the
| traditional second and the decimal second.
| raattgift wrote:
| Sure but using a physical pendulum as a frequency
| standard is unreliable; an unreliable frequency standard
| is a bad basis for any sort of time-of-travel definition
| of length.
|
| Many difficulties of using pendulum clocks (and in
| transporting any sort of chronometer) in real
| circumstances were also known before the revolution, with
| French clockmakers competing for the prize money in
| Britain's Longitude Act 1714 (13 Ann. c. 14) and the
| ancien regime's various prize offers in the 1740-1770s.
|
| Prior to Harrison's marine chronometers, _minimum_
| longitude errors introduced in multi-degree changes of
| latitudes were indeed on the order of 10% across an
| oceanic part of a great circle or other more favourable
| route under cloudy conditions, and sufficient that in the
| early 18th century it was common for ships to navigate by
| dead reckoning along a single line of latitude -- a boon
| to pirates and other enemies, and also often adding many
| days to the travel time, in an effort to avoid the common
| problem (eg. HMS Centurion, 1741) of not knowing whether
| one was west or east of a landmark at a known latitude.
|
| Prominent pre-revolutionary figures also disliked the
| idea of relying on chronometry for position/length/angle
| measurements generally -- most notably the excellent
| geometer and astronomer Pierre Bouguer (after whom the
| relevant <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouguer_anomaly>
| is named) -- so it's not as if messing up a seconds-
| pendulum-based definition of a metre (and its
| consequences for the neat pole-to-equator 1/4 great
| circle length or mass of a cm^3 of water at STP, both of
| which now are just approximately round numbers) would
| have been universally outrageous.
|
| And anyway surely one could consider a solution in which
| the half-period of the metre pendulum might not be
| exactly one decimal second. After all, at the time in
| practice one had to measure across many swings to obtain
| the effective length with reasonable precision. And
| Earth's rotation was known to be unstable (Richer,
| Newton, Maupertuis).
| hilbert42 wrote:
| What about 90deg per right angle and not 100deg?
|
| It made sense to keep some things like angle measurement and
| time as disruption was too great for very little practical
| benefit.
| az09mugen wrote:
| Still France and French revolution context :
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
| IAmBroom wrote:
| It's called a "gradian", and it's 1% of a right angle.
|
| It's still used in some industries, where convenient.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yeah, sure. The last person I heard discuss it was my
| highschool math teacher and he did so only in passing--
| and that was quite some decades ago.
|
| Anyway, my non-metric preference is the radian unless I'm
| doing something manual like woodworking.
| kitten_mittens_ wrote:
| If you're interested in a what an analog clock in decimal time
| might look like: https://decimal-time.netlify.app/
| az09mugen wrote:
| Ahah nice one, thanks for sharing !
| thrance wrote:
| Slightly unnerving seeing seconds pass by 15.74% faster.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Uncanny valley. Never seen a clock do it before.
| wyett wrote:
| My thoughts too.
| pavlov wrote:
| Feels like living in the future. Progress marches on faster
| than ever.
|
| Honestly a brilliant marketing move by the French
| revolutionaries, just a few hundred years too early.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| If they were truly revolutionary they would have gone for
| base 12 or 60 instead of 10
| timewizard wrote:
| The USPS uses decimal time for it's time keeping system. It
| serves almost no functional advantage.
|
| http://www.nalc3825.com/ETC_clockring_entries.pdf
| userbinator wrote:
| Decimal minutes instead of seconds, to be precise.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The way it should be.
|
| So imagine we get to Mars, establish a colony.
|
| Mars has a day which is 24h 36m.
|
| We could have all of our Martian colonists adhere to an
| Earth day of 24 hours, with sunrise and sunset drifting
| around the clock, or we could have them observe an extra
| 25th hour of the day that lasts 36 minutes.
|
| Or, we could define the Martian day as 24 Martian hours
| of 60 Martian minutes of 61.5 seconds, with seconds the
| invariant interchange time between planets.
|
| In turn, seconds stop being a unit of human timekeeping,
| and everyone just uses decimal minutes as the final
| subdivision.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Oh sweet summer child...we humans are tethered to Gaia.
| philwelch wrote:
| Speak for yourself
| ucarion wrote:
| And every other month was named after a coup d'etat!
| cafard wrote:
| As I habitually mention when the revolutionary calendar comes
| up, emacs calendar mode will give you the date with p-f. For
| what it's worth, today is Quartidi 4 Prairial an 233 de la
| Revolution, jour de l'Angelique. (Prairial I had heard of, jour
| de l'Angelique is news to me.)
|
| [edit: corrected spelling of Quartidi]
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Another "fun fact" somewhat more relevant to the article is the
| gradient (aka. grad, or gon), it is a unit of angle equal to
| 1/400 of a turn, slightly smaller than a degree.
|
| It goes well with the metre because 1 km is 1/100 grad of
| latitude on earth. It mirrors the nautical mile in that 1
| nautical mile is 1/60 degree (1 arcminute) of latitude on
| earth.
|
| The grad is almost never used on a day to day basis, even in
| France. It is still used in specialized fields, like surveying.
| vidarh wrote:
| In some languages, e.g. Norwegian, grad means degree.
| lxgr wrote:
| I believe it was one out of three possible options (other
| than degrees and radians) to represent angles on my high
| school scientific calculator.
|
| Accidentally staying in "grad" mode when cycling through them
| (DEG -> RAD -> GRAD) was always a concern, especially since
| the difference between RAD and GRAD was easy to miss on the
| small LCD display (the indicator was via partial selection of
| the letters within a mask spelling "DEGRAD").
| mjevans wrote:
| Given the difference of ( 10 00 00 ) / 86400 ; they made their
| second ~1.1574 times faster? ( 125 : 108 , or 5 * 5 * 5 : 2 2 3
| 3 3 )
| lxgr wrote:
| Ah, this brings back fond memories of Swatch's attempt [1] at a
| decimal division of the day at the height of the dotcom boom.
|
| I still must have one of these digital wristwatches in some box
| in a closet, with a big button that starts a glorious
| monochrome LCD animation of "going online" (while of course the
| watch stayed as offline as any other Quartz watch).
|
| The thought of a watch that could _actually_ go online seemed
| ridiculously utopian back then, even when everybody was
| otherwise dreaming of cyberspace. But only a few weeks ago, in
| a moment of closure spanning a quarter of a century, I finally
| downloaded a "Swatch Internet Time" complication - from the
| Internet, directly onto my wristwatch.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Things that annoy me about the metric system: base-10 numbering
| system, a liter is not a cubic meter, and 'kilogram' is the base
| unit, not 'gram'.
|
| That last one is what I have the biggest problem with. When you
| are doing anything with derived units, 'kilo' suddenly
| disappears.
| kergonath wrote:
| > base-10 numbering system
|
| Having decimal numbers, it's the best solution. Otherwise
| you're bound to make mistakes scaling things up or down.
|
| > a liter is not a cubic meter
|
| Well, it's a dm^3, close enough ;) Conversion is trivial, 1 m^3
| is 1000 l. A cubic metre is a bit large for everyday use, but
| it makes sense e.g. when measuring water consumption or larger
| volumes. The litre also had the advantage of being close to 2
| pints, so it already made sense as a unit when it was
| introduced. Contrary to hours with 100s.
|
| > 'kilogram' is the base unit, not 'gram'
|
| Yeah, this one is perplexing. It's an annoying inconsistency on
| an otherwise beautifully regular system.
| GlobalFrog wrote:
| I don't understand your issue between gram and kilo gram:
| gram is the base unit and the prefix kilo, meaning one
| thousand just says that 1 kg = 1000 grams. It is exactly the
| same as meters and kilometers: meters is the base unit and 1
| km = 1000 meters.
| tokai wrote:
| I think they mean that the gram is defined as 1/1000 of a
| kilogram. With a kilogram having a definition based on
| physical constants.
| jabl wrote:
| The kilogram is no longer defined by a physical artifact,
| fwiw.
|
| Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due
| to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are
| defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the
| unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not
| gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which
| inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And
| so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but
| doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get
| used to it.
| DavidSJ wrote:
| In SI, kg is the base unit, and g is a derived unit.
| selkin wrote:
| It's an historical artifact, as it was easier to
| manufacture a reference kilogram than a reference gram.
|
| Considering today we set the kilogram by fixing the
| Planck constant and deriving it from there, we can just
| divide each side of the definition by 1000 and use that
| as a base unit. Using kg as the base unit is completely
| arbitrary, as we can derive each unit of weight directly
| from the meter and the second, not from the base unit.
| mmooss wrote:
| Why not call the thing that weighs ~2.2 pounds a 'gram'?
| selkin wrote:
| For the same reason it was not renamed "Wug".
| mmooss wrote:
| It's not the same reason. Gram is already part of the
| nomenclature, wug is not. The change I asked about would
| shift the relation of the prefixes to the masses:
| kilogram would represent a mass 1,000 times larger than
| it does now.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There's an etymological reason for the word gram. It
| derives from a greek word gramma which roughly translates
| as "small weight" and made its way into French via the
| latin gramma to the French gramme, and the English gram.
| And 1kg is just very chunky. It wouldn't be right to
| refer to that as small.
|
| As the name kilogram implies, gram is actually the unit
| here. But it was derived from the mass of a standard 1 kg
| chunk of metal that lives in a museum somewhere near
| Paris. This is the literal base unit of mass (at least
| historically, the definition has since been redefined
| using the Planck constant). A 1 gram chunk would have
| been tiny and be tedious to work with doing e.g.
| experiments with gravity.
|
| They also have the original prototype meter in the form
| of a length of platinum-iridium alloy bar. And because
| the specific reference object for mass weighs 1kg instead
| of 1g, it means 1kg is the base unit in SI.
|
| But quite obvious in the system of measurements, the gram
| is the logical unit here that you augment with prefixes
| and people commonly handle a lot of mass quantities that
| are in the order of grams rather than kg.
|
| Derivations are simple. Simply apply powers of ten and
| their commonly used prefixes (kilo, milli, mega, micro
| etc.). The base unit is something physical that you can
| point at as the base unit. Or at least historically that
| was the intention.
|
| There's also convenience. A 1l of water is about 1kg and
| a volume of 10x10x10cm. or 1 dm3. That's not accidental
| but intentional. It makes it easy to work with volumes
| and masses for people. Never mind that a liter of water
| isn't exactly a kg (because water purity, temperature,
| and a few other things).
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Kilogram is indeed the base SI unit and not gram. It's an
| exception.
|
| Every formula using SI will expect mass in kg and you
| will be off a factor of 1000 if you use gram as the base
| unit. Same with derivative units like the newton which
| all use mass in kg for conversion.
| jl6 wrote:
| Why is base 10 annoying?
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Too few divisors of place values. The idea you would pick
| something that isn't evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4 was
| a mistake.
|
| This one isn't metric's fault to be fair. That's just what
| you get for inventing numbers before inventing math.
|
| Makes me wonder what would have happened if 'French numbers'
| in base 12, 36 or 60 were introduced at the same time.
|
| People got used to working in octal.or hexadecimal in the
| past for computers, doesn't seem like it would have been as
| big of a change as you think.
| tokai wrote:
| >evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4
|
| Irrelevant with a decimal system.
| chungy wrote:
| It's not irrelevant, you can choose something like 12 to
| make all your factors out of. It's a particular strength
| of working in feet and yards.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Except now you can't divide accurately by 5. Or 10.
|
| You're making an argument from familiarity. Yes, a
| 12-base system using fractions works very neatly in a
| small human-sized domain, but it disintegrates into
| complete uselessness outside that domain. That's why you
| get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch, or
| that there's 63360 inches in a mile. It's unworkable for
| very large distances and very small distances. With a
| metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any
| conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at
| any scale with a single unit.
|
| Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?
|
| Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?
| tempestn wrote:
| 5 and 10 are arbitrary numbers though. Halving and
| doubling are really the only special operations, and
| base-8 or base-16 would be superior to 10 or 12 for
| those.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 10 is arbitrary, but it's also the base chosen for our
| counting system.
|
| You can use hexadecimal numbers if you wish. "He's B6 cm
| tall."
|
| I have found this, which seems neat:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibi-binary
|
| So he's ki-ba cm tall.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Ugg, that naming system is the worst I've ever seen. It's
| like it's asking for you to mis-hear numbers. Use a range
| of consonants!
| chungy wrote:
| > That's why you get ridiculousness as things being
| 13/64th of an inch
|
| Such fractions are very rarely used, you're more likely
| to use mils (1/1000 of an inch) at that scale.
|
| > or that there's 63360 inches in a mile.
|
| Likewise, something that will probably never come up in
| your life. Inches/feet/yards and miles just remain
| separate things, never mixed.
|
| > With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any
| conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at
| any scale with a single unit.
|
| There's no intuition for them. Knowing what a meter is
| does not help with getting a feel for a kilometer. They
| might as well be as separate as feet and miles at that
| scale.
|
| > Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?
|
| That one's not even hard, it's just a fraction. 35/64"
|
| > Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?
|
| Another arbitrary problem that will probably never come
| up, but to entertain you: since 0.5 lbs is 8oz, adding
| 1.6oz to that (another tenth of a lbs) results in 9.6oz.
| 10oz is bigger than 0.6 lbs. Not hard, but at least
| mildly harder than the first question.
|
| None of this really had to do with the convenience
| highlighted initially: 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in
| a yard make extremely convenient divisible factors. You
| can trivially divide things by 2, 3, 4, and 6 and keep
| with whole integer values. The same definitely cannot be
| said of metric.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > Inches/feet/yards and miles just remain separate
| things, never mixed
|
| How tall are you, maybe 70 inches? Or 5 5/6 ft?
|
| 178cm or 1.78m are so obviously equivalent it doesn't
| matter which is used.
|
| > 12 inches in a foot and 3 feet in a yard make extremely
| convenient divisible factors.
|
| This requires you to start with 12 inches. If you're
| making a cupboard to fit in an 183/4" (476mm) space, it's
| no use, or is only randomly useful.
|
| If you can choose, then you can just as easily start with
| 36cm. For example, European kitchens are designed around
| a 300mm base size.
| chungy wrote:
| > How tall are you, maybe 70 inches? Or 5 5/6 ft?
|
| Are you purposely doing this? That is obviously not what
| I meant. Nobody says "3 miles, 500 feet", they say "3.1
| miles". Effectively two systems of distance measurement:
| inches/feet/yards (near scale), and miles (distant
| scale).
|
| "5 feet 10 inches" is completely normal and fine.
|
| > This requires you to start with 12 inches. If you're
| making a cupboard to fit in an 183/4" (476mm) space, it's
| no use, or is only randomly useful.
|
| So you cut the cupboard to fit a 183/4" space, no big
| deal. Same as anything else, and just as random as 476mm.
|
| Typically they come in (integer!) 12-inch, 24-inch,
| 36-inch, or 48-inch variants.
| saalweachter wrote:
| This is honestly the problem with critiquing any system
| from without: you don't know what's _really_ wrong with
| it.
|
| Fucking bushels, man.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| They are talking past each other. One is saying, "metric
| is better than imperial", the other is saying "imperial
| works". Neither claim is relevant to the other.
| int_19h wrote:
| Obviously, the base should be the same for units as it is
| for numbers in general, but there are good arguments in
| favor of using 12 for both. Then all your examples become
| as simple as division by 5 is in decimal.
| philwelch wrote:
| > 63360 inches in a mile
|
| Nobody cares how many inches are in a mile. It doesn't
| matter.
|
| > Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?
|
| 35/64. Was that supposed to be hard? Common denominators
| are elementary school level arithmetic.
|
| > Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?
|
| 10oz. 10/16 is 5/8 which is .625.
|
| I agree that metric is easier for people who don't have a
| grasp of fifth grade arithmetic.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Irrelevant if you are working with computers and digital
| equipment.
|
| Highly relevant if you are using T-squares, compasses,
| and dividing calipers.
| mfost wrote:
| It's just a matter of working with base elements that are
| divisible by 3 and 4 really.
|
| So instead of buying 100cm planks, buy 120cm planks?
| philwelch wrote:
| And eventually you're going to want a name for your 120cm
| unit. But that's not allowed in metric because any named
| unit has to be base 10.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| It has a name. It's the plank length.
| tempestn wrote:
| It's pretty relevant with computers. If we were used to
| working in base-8 or base-16 in everyday life, numerous
| aspects of programming would be simplified.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| The biggest source of communication issues around these
| unit systems is that in metric, you're _supposed_ to
| reach for decimals when working with the units, and in
| imperial, you 're _supposed_ to reach for fractions when
| working with the units.
|
| Which is why the imperial lovers all cry out about their
| fractions not "working" in metric. Yes, exactly, that is
| the point. They don't understand that they're reaching
| for a tool they shouldn't be reaching for, and then they
| blame the unit system for it.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Base 60 is genuinely the best option.
| layer8 wrote:
| That would have broken ASCII.
| forty wrote:
| Don't you think base 10 was used simply because it
| conveniently matches the number of fingers of Humans?
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Of course... But - look at your open hand right now.
| Count the number of segments on your 4 fingers - it's 12.
| You can even use your thumb as a pointer and count one
| handed.
| tempestn wrote:
| Or forget about the thumbs and just count fingers. 8
| would be a better base than 10 for sure, and arguably
| better than 12. (Easier doubling and halving, easier
| binary conversions, but fewer integer factors and fewer
| digits.)
| empath75 wrote:
| There's two reasons to use a measurement system -- one of
| those is for sort of every day work -- cooking, home
| carpentry and the like, and in that case, having something
| like the imperial system is nice, because you can divide
| things usefully.
|
| The _other_ reason to use a measurement system is for doing
| _science_, and for that, having everything in base ten
| makes things _immensely_ easier, especially if you're
| working the math out by hand
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > because you can divide things usefully.
|
| Again, this is just familiarity. You think it's super
| neat that you can divide a cup of whatever by 2 or 3 or
| 4, but if I tell you to divide it by 5, you're gonna
| deflect and ask me "who does that?!?"
|
| Imperial works neatly for a small domain of problems, and
| is useless outside that domain.
|
| Metric is less neat in that small domain, but works
| equally well everywhere.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Well no...
|
| Firstly, we can divide a cup by 2, 3, and 4 in the
| kitchen because those are common measuring-cup sizes.
| Nobody is prevented from using a fractional size: if I
| divide a cup by 5 then I have 1/5th of a cup, nothing
| more and nothing less.
|
| While 1/4th of a cup is 2 oz, and 1/3rd of a cup is 16
| teaspoons, 1/5th of a cup doesn't divide evenly into a
| smaller unit and that's why "we don't do it", but there
| is nothing to stop the chef from using 9 teaspoons. [Or
| he can instinctively go up to 45mL on his graduated
| measuring cup, which almost always has both systems on
| it!] Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and
| gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you
| internalize it, you can convert like a boss.
|
| While I'm sure it's lovely that metric measures divide by
| 2 and 5, that's all they divide by, so in terms of
| divisors, you've lost 3, 4, 6, 8...
|
| So if it really is about dividing things _usefully_
| without resorting to _fractions_ , then using a system
| that is nothing but multiples of 10 is a handicap, when
| we've had systems with lovely 12s and 16s with many
| different options for dividing them up.
|
| But the metric people can simply chop up the measures
| even more finely and claim victory. For example,
| currency: it was in multiples of 16 or 8 which allowed
| for limited permutations. Decimalization chopped it into
| pennies, and we find 100 gradations in every pound
| sterling. All that did is make base-10 math easier for
| bean counters, and confuse people on the streets with a
| mystifying array of coinage. [Mental math indicates that
| it must increase the volume of coins per average
| transaction, as well.]
|
| If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many
| people can put two fingers together and estimate that on
| the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a
| millimeter?
|
| Oh, and, have you ever found a nice British recipe in
| metric, shopped at your American grocery store, and
| prepared that in your American kitchen with your
| Fahrenheit range? You will eventually want to tip it all
| in the rubbish bin. Adam Ragusea suggests as much:
| https://youtu.be/TE8xg3d8dBg?si=SD8wLxD6ib6InLX4
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and
| gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you
| internalize it, you can convert like a boss.
|
| "It's super easy if you're familiar with it!"
|
| Yes, that is exactly the problem that you are unable to
| see.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| > If a basic customary unit of length is an inch, many
| people can put two fingers together and estimate that on
| the human scale. But who can estimate or eyeball a
| millimeter?
|
| If you'd grown with a metric system you could eyeball a
| centimeter with ease. Also comparing orders of magnitude
| different measures for estimation isn't fair, how precise
| would be your guess of a barleycorn?
| kimmk wrote:
| From an European view who has accustomed to imperial
| units, these discussions are so tiring. The metric vs
| imperial debates almost always come down to just
| personally preferring what you're familiar with. I've had
| the exact same feelings about imperial units as Americans
| express of metric. I really don't have a problem
| estimating what 10 cm or 1 kg or 1 kilometer or 2 degrees
| of Celsius difference in the weather is.
|
| And the division issue is almost trivial in my view; you
| can just take 120 cm or 12 gram quantity. You don't
| magically lose the ability to divide things by other than
| 10 or 5 or 2 when using metric. Its not like decimal
| fractions disappear in imperial systems either. The
| metric system is there for making it easy to scale things
| between orders of magnitude and have sane conversions
| between units.
| jeltz wrote:
| > But who can estimate or eyeball a millimeter?
|
| Probably most people in the world. I can for sure do it.
| It's trivial if you grew up with the system.
| chthonicdaemon wrote:
| I think there is true utility in choosing a unit scheme
| that matches your number scheme. So we use decimal numbers,
| makes sense to use decimal units. It seems you're arguing
| that the real mistake is using decimal numbers to begin
| with?
| cryptonector wrote:
| Er, `gram` most definitely is the base unit. Kilogram is what's
| handy for humans given how light a gram is.
|
| EDIT: Yes, yes, SI defines the kg and then the g by reference
| to kg, but so what, notionally it's still the gram that's the
| base unit.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Not adopting grav is my biggest hate with SI system...
| nartho wrote:
| I always think about what a cool adventure it must have been, for
| Pierre Mechain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre to roam for 7 years, go
| wherever they need thanks to an official letter, make
| calculations and come back successful to Paris. To think that
| they were only off by .2mm !
| selkin wrote:
| "The Measure of All Things" by Ken Adler[0] is a good,
| extremely readable book about their adventure, which was indeed
| wild.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-0-349-...
| frasermarlow wrote:
| Yes, this is a brilliant book, and well worth reading.
| Another other one in the same vein is "Longitude" by Dava
| Sobel: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-
| Scientific-...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| As an American, I finally relented and purchased a Metric
| measuring tape after the ordeal of trying to measure the
| dimensions of the rooms in my house. When it comes to interior
| decorating, trying to figure out how to evenly space items that
| are sized in feet, inches, and fractional inches is a nightmare.
| Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 71/2 inches long against a
| wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this task with 80
| centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter wall.
|
| I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans to
| view dimensions in metric site-wide. You can still see dimensions
| in metric but those only appear on the pictures of some items.
| The webpage still converts all textual measurements to Imperial.
| You can't sort and search using metric values. IKEA designs
| everything in metric, using nice, even, whole numbers. Please let
| me see those. Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an
| inch feels like vandalism.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans
| to view dimensions in metric
|
| I'm not American and laughed at this.
|
| Welcome to the other side. Also, here in New Zealand people
| seem to do everything in metric, except their height and the
| weight of their baby. Why?
| remram wrote:
| As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units
| are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4
| poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns
| to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.
|
| People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion
| factors. Did you know that most of us don't even know how
| to convert between our own units? I invite you to go around
| and ask 'how many pints are in a gallon?'.
|
| It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to realize
| that there are four quarts in a gallon...
|
| I have no such trouble with _any_ SI unit. So with that, I
| will leave you with this!
|
| "For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are
| these: 'The French were right again!'"
| toolslive wrote:
| > Save your sanity, don't bother learning the conversion
| factors.
|
| They were drilled into my brain when I was in primary
| school: 10, 100 and 1000.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Even before real school started, I think many of us in
| Europe played with base ten blocks. As far as I know they
| are always centimetre-sized, so the 1000-cube is a litre.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_ten_blocks
| nancyminusone wrote:
| The US doesn't and never has used the imperial system, as
| it did not participate in the unit reforms of 1824.
|
| 5 us gallons is about 4 imperial gallons.
| remram wrote:
| I know that, but Americans don't and ask for "Imperial".
| No one has ever asked me for "US customary". Either way,
| I am using those units to be facetious more than
| compliant ;-)
|
| In practice the volume units are a much bigger problem. I
| have not hit anyone with the "cubic hand" yet...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The US uses the US customary system, not Imperial. [0] US
| customary and Imperial share some units, and, confusingly,
| share even more unit _names_ , but they are different
| systems.
|
| [0] well, really, it uses metric with a redefined version
| of the old US customary system layered over it to prevent
| people from noticing, but...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| We've made an inconsistent and confusing system even more
| inconsistent and confusing. How apropos!
| saalweachter wrote:
| Hey, don't blame us for Britain going stone-mad after the
| Revolution and redefining all of their units in crazy
| ways. We weren't a part of it.
|
| Now, choosing wine gallons as our standard gallon, that
| might deserve a little blame.
| manarth wrote:
| That's a fairly long-standing pre-metric tradition.
|
| In Sweden, 1 foot was around 28.96cm (in modern
| dimensions), whilst 1 foot in Amsterdam was 28.31cm.
|
| On such differences (OK, and a few other contributing
| factors) a ship was sunk.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| In 1776 everyone was still using the Winchester System.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_measure The UK
| didn't adopt the _Imperial_ system until 1824-1826. Us
| Yanks have to suffer the indignity of our meager 473
| mililitre pints.
| geoffmunn wrote:
| I am 100% convinced that the baby weight thing is because
| grandparents love to compare newborns with their own
| experiences, and they were on the cusp of the metric
| conversion in the 60s. In a decade or two, this will
| vanish.
|
| Imperial height is because 6 feet is the generic height of
| a "tall person" - we get so much of our sporting news from
| overseas and no one bothers to convert it.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 5 m = 1 rod; 5 furlong = 1 km.
|
| Also, the US doesn't use imperial, dammit. It uses US
| customary units. They're related but different systems with
| radically different definitions on many units.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >I am angry that IKEA's localization does not allow Americans
| to view dimensions in metric site-wide.
|
| Change to the IKEA site of a different country (via what comes
| immediately after `ikea.com/`).
| Snild wrote:
| It seems the Canadian site gives both sets of units:
| https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/brimnes-cabinet-with-doors-whit...
|
| I guess they thought the mere sight of metric would offend the
| Americans. :)
|
| Maybe the product ranges between the countries is close enough
| that the Canadian site is an alternative?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Imagine trying to space objects 2 feet 71/2 inches long
| against a wall that is 13 feet 2 inches long. Now imagine this
| task with 80 centimeter long objects and a ~400 centimeter
| wall._
|
| You've made an artificially hard example (Ikea doesn't separate
| units, it is just inches).
|
| What's harder, a 24" object on a 160" wall, or a 59cm object on
| a 4m 3cm wall?
|
| Or to compare like for like (rounding & unified units), a 24"
| object on a 160" wall vs a 60cm object on a 400cm wall? Seems
| the same.
| justinrubek wrote:
| That's part of the point, though. Ikea might not do separate
| units, but this is not an uncommon practice elsewhere. In the
| metric example I don't need rounding because I can trivially
| see 4m 3cm and know it's 403cm. With inches I'd have to do
| multiplication to handle mixed units.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| but you have to do math to convert 13 foot 4 inches to 160
| inches vs just moving decimals
| lysace wrote:
| > Seeing them converted to the nearest 32nd of an inch feels
| like vandalism.
|
| Malicious compliance.
|
| As a non-American: I love it. ;)
| nautilius wrote:
| To be fair, Americans use decimal already where it's dearest to
| the heart: money, ammunition, and filling gasoline.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| Don't forget prescription drugs (mg).
| bowsamic wrote:
| I don't understand why American things absolutely never have
| dual measurements. I've been reading books on pregnancy and
| newborns written in the US but available across the world and
| every table is in only US units
| bambax wrote:
| Here's a completely random anecdote: my mother often told me that
| her father, my grandfather, born in France in 1899, sculptor,
| draftsman and general maker of things, had a strong dislike of
| the metric system. He complained continuously that anything with
| round metric ratios was "ugly" and that beauty could only be
| found in more ancient measuring systems.
|
| He died when I was 4 so it's not a first hand account, I'm not
| sure how much of it is true or what he really thought, but
| somehow it feels right.
|
| The metric system is incredibly useful and practical (of course)
| but there's something rigid and unpleasant about it.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| I know modern craftsmen* who lament the same. Being able to
| divide things in 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 is mechanically more useful
| than 2/5/10 (the former being achievable by drafting tools more
| easily).
|
| *Yes, it should be craftspeople, but that doesn't exactly sound
| like the same thing, and anyway all of them happen to be men.
| claudex wrote:
| Nohting prevent you to use the metric system and use 60cm
| (for example) as a base unit for your construction. So you
| can easily divide it by 12 if you want.
| rags2riches wrote:
| Just one example I'm familiar with. Drywall typically comes
| in widths of 1200 mm and are mounted on studs 600 mm c/c.
| Svip wrote:
| Nothing's stopping you from defining beautiful ratios and
| express the result in metric units, like ISO 216.[0] It feels
| like an odd complaint about the utility of the metric system,
| as if it is the _only_ system; ratios aren 't even units
| themselves!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216
| toolslive wrote:
| Still, wouldn't base 12 be better than base 10 ?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Pretty much everyone born from -2,500 BCE to ~1800 CE would
| agree, and a significant of those born since.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| https://dozenal.org/ The Dozenal Society of America would agree
| with you.
| sham1 wrote:
| Number bases are arbitrary. Like, base 12 certainly has
| interesting properties since it is a highly composite number,
| but a lot of the convenient representations can be achieved by
| using actual fractions instead of insisting on radix
| points/commas.
|
| For example, 1/4 being 0.3 in base 12 can make certain
| computations easier (just as a 1/3 being 0.4_12 would), but
| again, what's wrong with 1/4 and 1/3 respectively.
|
| Of course, things like duodecimal and base-6 are interesting to
| use, but at this point the convention is base-10 and it
| probably won't change for a while. It's kinda like the \pi Vs
| \tau debate, where even with all the elegance and easier
| pedagogy brought by the use of \tau as the fundamental circle
| constant, the existing convention does matter, and probably
| matters a lot more in general than the better alternative.
|
| Of course, this also applied to the SI units. It literally took
| a major historical revolution for these units to be a) defined
| and b) getting used over the old units.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Number bases are arbitrary.
|
| You could do it that way if you didn't care at all for how
| people actually use the system or what they would prefer;
| however, it's just your decision that's arbitrary, not the
| actual choice of "best base for worldwide everyday use."
|
| > 1/4 being 0.3 in base 12
|
| And 5/6ths is 0.A in hexadecimal base 12. The choice of a
| base should imply a choice of alphabet. For something like
| base 12 you may actually want to rediscover or invent new
| numeral characters.
|
| > but at this point the convention is base-10
|
| Except for time. Which appears constantly in physical units.
|
| > b) getting used over the old units.
|
| Even then. No one will tell you the sun is "93 Gm" from
| Earth. It's always 93 million km. They haven't exactly gotten
| into the new system just yet. They've just swapped base
| units.
| toolslive wrote:
| > Number bases are arbitrary.
|
| They are not: base 2 is minimal, but not practical for
| humans. You would not force base 2310 to anyone even though
| it has a nice set of divisors. So there is a sweet spot
| somewhere between 6 and 16.
| metalman wrote:
| it could actualy be phrased the other way.... "the lack of a
| meter caused the french revolution" ok, no, but it most definetly
| contributed to the revolution, as France was a maze of competing
| local measurement "standards" that caused a lot of problems and
| expense in business and trade, some of it wildly subjective, like
| an acre of land was not an area measurement, but was based on how
| much grain a given piece of land could grow.......and at one
| point before the revolution, there had begun a highly contentious
| attempt to straiten the whole mess out
| Xmd5a wrote:
| The meter wasn't invented during the French Revolution, it
| evolved from ancient measurement systems based on the golden
| ratio.
|
| Traditional body measurements (thumb, palm, span, foot, cubit)
| follow a Fibonacci-like progression where each unit [?] ph times
| the previous one. If we consider the Egyptian cubit as p/6 meters
| (which matches historical measurements), here's a possible
| insight:
|
| Draw a circle with diameter 1 meter. Remove 1/6 of the perimeter
| (p/6), subtract the diameter (1), and you get [?]1.618 -
| essentially ph. This geometric construction lets you build an
| entire measurement system using just a stick and basic geometry.
| Once you have any two consecutive units, you can generate the
| entire sequence by addition (palm + span = foot) or subtraction
| (span - palm = thumb's breadth).
|
| In the pre-metric French system, a span was exactly 20cm. When
| you scale 0.2 x ph2 you get p/6 with 4-digit precision. But
| here's what's interesting: using our geometric approximation ph
| [?] 5p/6 - 1, the equation 0.2 x ph2 = p/6 works out *exactly*.
| The "approximation error" in ph perfectly cancels out due to ph2
| = ph + 1, making 0.2 x (5p/6 - 1 + 1) = p/6.
|
| Here's another "coincidence": Multiple 17th-century scientists
| (Mersenne, Huygens, Wilkins) proposed defining a universal unit
| as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of 1 second. Tito
| Livio Burattini, inspired by his travels in Egypt, formalized
| this in his "Misura Universale" (1675), measuring this pendulum
| length at 0.9939 meters - essentially our modern meter.
|
| The "revolutionary" meter system was really just formalizing
| measurement relationships that builders had been using for
| millennia. The French didn't invent it - they just gave ancient
| ph-based measurements a decimal makeover.
| cooljoseph wrote:
| It is possible to construct ph exactly with a straight-edge and
| compass. Would the approximation of 5p/6 - 1 be used because
| it's easier to calculate quickly?
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Yes ph is a constructible number and more generally an
| algebraic number, solution of the polynomial equation x^2 = x
| + 1. However p is not, and so is my approximation of ph as
| 5p/6 - 1. Here non-constructibility (in the mathematical
| sense) translates to the fact there is no method to
| "straighten" an arc into a segment using a compass and a
| ruler. But bear with me because the 5p/6 - 1 approximation of
| phi has more to say.
|
| First, the "conspiracy theory" that the meter is linked to
| Earth's dimensions and harmonizes with ancient measurement
| units through a shared reference actually _predates_ the
| meter 's definition. This idea was a thread of interest among
| the scientists who developed a universal measurement system -
| one that could be derived anywhere on the planet.
|
| >One can well sense that it can only be through comparisons
| of measurements made in ancient times & in our days on
| monuments still existing, that I can determine to how many of
| our toises the Geometers of antiquity would have evaluated a
| degree of Meridian. Now I find, 1st. that the side of the
| base of the great pyramid of Egypt taken five hundred times;
| 2nd. that the cubit of the Nilometer taken two hundred
| thousand times; 3rd. that a stadium existing & measured at
| Laodicea in Asia Minor, by Mr. Smith, & taken five hundred
| times; I find, I say, that these three products are each of
| the same value, & that each in particular is precisely the
| same measure of a degree [of a Meridian], which has been
| determined by our modern Geometers.
|
| Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton, Metrology, or Treatise on
| measures, weights and currencies, of the ancients and the
| moderns, 1780
|
| more context: https://anonpaste.pw/v/71abb0f8-5a03-4cb5-879a-
| d4f44ad6d57c#...
|
| original:
| https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55491755/f126.item
|
| >Newton was trying to uncover the unit of measurement used by
| those constructing the pyramids. He thought it was likely
| that the ancient Egyptians had been able to measure the Earth
| and that, by unlocking the cubit of the Great Pyramid, he too
| would be able to measure the circumference of the Earth.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/dec/06/revealed-
| isa...
|
| Having said that(-1 downvotes!), let's recap:
|
| This is how we can construct a royal cubit from a circle of
| diameter = 1m:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/HmnfDKR
|
| ph = 2cos(p/5) lead us to this construction around a pentagon
| from which we can derive the "pige" or "quine" of cathedral
| builders (for now consider this is historically true)
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pige_(mesure)
|
| https://imgur.com/a/ZqprfAd
|
| What I mentioned earlier was that using a circle-based
| construction(diameter = 1m), one can derive a non-
| constructible approximation of ph, namely ph = 5p/6 - 1, with
| the remarkable property that 0.2 x ph2 = p/6, thanks to ph2 =
| ph + 1.
|
| But what's truly elegant is that this process has a symmetric
| counterpart, where we approximate p using ph. This time, we
| begin with a constructible triangle, sometimes called the
| triangle of the builders (1, 2, [?]5), whose perimeter is:
| t = (1 + 2 + [?]5)/10
|
| This value is fully constructible with compass and
| straightedge, and numerically it approximates p/6 to four
| digits. If we treat this `t` as a stand-in for p/6 in the
| previous formula: ph = 5t - 1
|
| we recover the *exact golden ratio*: ph =
| (5 x (3 + [?]5)/10) - 1 = (1 + [?]5)/2
|
| And then, going full circle: 0.2 x ph2 = t
| again
|
| In both directions, 0.2 (i.e., 1/5) emerges as the key
| scaling factor, bridging the decimal system, ph, and p
| through geometry. It ties together: - the
| constructible (t from the triangle), - the
| transcendental (p/6 from the circle), and - the
| algebraic (ph2 = ph + 1)
|
| ^this is a new result I just found.
|
| For the historically conservative, arguments can be made that
| these considerations are pseudo-historical, that the "quine
| of cathedral builders" is an unsubstantiated myth. See the
| wikipedia link above for the "pige"
|
| or this recent article: https://classiques-
| garnier.com/aedificare-2021-2-revue-inter...
|
| this one too: http://compagnonsdudevoir.fr/?p=790
|
| >This greatly saddens those who have built an entire
| "operative" narrative around this kind of knowledge
| supposedly passed down in secret among the compagnons of the
| Tour de France for centuries... and have made it their
| pedestal. The question of how "tradition" is constructed
| among the compagnons (and incidentally among the Freemasons)
| remains a taboo that absolutely needs to be broken -- and not
| just for the sake of advancing historical knowledge.
|
| Also this blog post traces the confabulation of the quine to
| Le Corbusier's Modulor system based on the golden ratio:
| https://blogruz.blogspot.com/2007/12/en-qui-quine.html
|
| >Le Corbusier considered various sets of proportions, notably
| using a human height of 1.75 meters, before settling in 1947
| on a single set based on a height of 1.83 meters. He chose
| this because the associated Modulor measurement of 226 cm
| corresponds to within less than a millimeter of 89 inches --
| 89 being a number in the Fibonacci sequence that provides
| some of the best approximations of the golden ratio.
|
| >This system was intended to unite all nations around a
| universal standard, effectively casting aside the metric
| system, if not the decimal system entirely. We know how that
| turned out: the Modulor was essentially used for only one
| major creation -- albeit a significant one -- the Cite
| Radieuse in Marseille, completed in 1952, where all
| dimensions, down to the built-in furniture, are derived from
| the Modulor.
|
| Makes you think... The fact we don't have documents isn't
| surprising given that the campagnons (or later freemasons)
| communicated practical (then mystical) knowledge esoterically
| for political reasons (See
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnonnage).
|
| Nonetheless, the same motivations and the same quest for
| harmony (in the obsessive, symbolic sense) can be observed in
| Le Corbusier. As if the situation follows a geometric
| progression: in this sense, the "ancients" were as puzzled as
| we are by unexpected harmonies and actively sought them, and
| if you look at the historical sequence that lead to the
| definition of the meter, this is what you find.
|
| Compare the length of a greek foot with a roman foot: 30.87cm
| vs 29.62cm. The ratio matches 24/25 with 3 nines of
| precision. 24*25*7 forms a pythagorean triangle. As if the
| definition of some measurement units were retrofitted to
| facilitate conversion. If this kind of behavior leads to the
| formation of a strange graph of quasi-conversions or
| numerical coincidences, then maybe we could explain the
| emergence of patterns such as the 5p/6 - 1 approximation of
| ph without needing to argue for (or against) someone's
| intention behind what appears as a design choice.
|
| Alternatively the measures of the tools or geometric
| constructs that drive these conversions are
| idealized/approximated with a ratio, hence the delusion of
| the conspiracy theorists. But as I said, "ancients" had the
| same attitude, in particular with irrational numbers they
| wished to express as a ratio. Imagine the kind of problem the
| pseudo-phi <-> pseudo-p/6 complex I desribed above posed to
| people who where attempting to _construct_ a straight line of
| length pi using only a compass and a straight-edge and
| establishing mathematics more rigorously. That 's quite a
| nasty trap. Surely they found themselves in a mindstate that
| must not be that different from ours. Put in other words, the
| situation is hyperstionnal, and if we want to understand what
| is happening (whether this is an illusion or not) I think we
| should try to tackle this from a cognitive angle and model
| surprise explicitly.
|
| Some more links:
|
| https://www.messagedelanuitdestemps.org/les-principales-
| unit...
|
| https://martouf.ch/2021/03/le-metre-une-matrice-
| universelle-...
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| So did the guillotine, but that doesn't mean everyone should go
| around using them.
| rippeltippel wrote:
| > From 1983, a metre was considered the distance that light
| travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second (because light
| travels 299,792,458 metres per second).
|
| So the speed of light was calculated using a previous definition
| of metre, and that magic number was used to upgrade its own
| definition? That's a tautology, sounds wrong to me.
| grey413 wrote:
| There's a consistent effort to make all the SI metric units
| based off of discreet measurements of physical constants. The
| speed of light is a constant, and the SI second is "defined by
| taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency DnCs,
| the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of
| the caesium-133 atom, to be 9,192,631,770 when expressed in the
| unit Hz, which is equal to s^-1"
| willsoon wrote:
| 10 days a week? Why. Because we have ten fingers, oc. 13 months
| was a year in the matriarchy, the lunar months... 12 was the
| monarchy and the church. We are back to 12 bc it is divisible for
| more numbers. But the metre was the great FR's legacy. It is
| under a dome, and you pay if you want a copy of fraternity. A
| inch does not exists. It's a just a fraction of the Paris' metre.
| n1b0m wrote:
| "It fell to a pair of astronomers to calculate this distance, and
| after seven years, in 1799, they presented their final
| measurement to the French Academy of Sciences which made a "Metre
| of the Archives" in the form of a platinum bar."
|
| What unit did they use to measure the length of the platinum bar?
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