Measuring Up #4

I was at a gathering recently, and a little girl (eight or nine years old) was telling my teacher friend Jellyfish about her Steiner primary school.

JELLY: So what kind of maths are you learning?

LITTLE GIRL: Measurement.

JELLY: That's what I'm doing with my kids at the moment! Are you doing millimetres and metres?

LITTLE GIRL: No.

JELLY: Oh. Centimetres?

LITTLE GIRL: (blank) ...

JELLY: (wary) Inches?

LITTLE GIRL: (shakes head) ...

JELLY: What are you measuring in?

The LITTLE GIRL holds up her arm.

LITTLE GIRL: Cubits!

JELLY: (in horror) Cubits.

LITTLE GIRL: Yep. It's the length of this part of your arm.

JELLY: Like in Noah's Ark.

LITTLE GIRL: Yes.

JELLY: (cries)

We didn't get a chance to ask the little girl exactly which type of cubits she was learning about. Roman cubits (444.5mm)? Greek cubits? (463.1mm)? Arabic cubits (650.2mm)? Mesopotamian cubits (533.4mm)? Babylonian cubits (496.1mm)? Not to mention Salamis cubits, Persian cubits, the Pergamon cubit the Mesoamerican cubit and the various different Jewish cubits.

Measuring Up #3

The crazy kids of the French Revolution decided that, while everything was being overthrown, it might be a good time to get on with implementing the whole metric malarkey that Leibniz had been banging on about for so long.

And there was a bit of resistance, but on the whole, the people of France had plenty to be protesting about, and their pitchforks were mostly engaged elsewhere. And it looked like the whole thing would go ahead. It was a pretty sensible idea, after all. Dividing everything up into tens. We have ten fingers, after all.

Except then some smartarse decided that since they were doing metric measurment, they should really do metric time as well. And that didn't go down so well.

Suddenly, midnight was 10 o'clock. Midday was 5 o'clock. There were 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour. Oh, and they started the years again from 0.

So if they'd kept it, and we'd adopted it along with the rest of the metric system, today would be Decadi, 30th Prairial, 216. And it would be 5:65, instead of 2:35.

Needless to say, it didn't really catch on, and was abandoned after six months.

Measuring Up #2

Today I'm going to share some of my favourite units of measurement.

1. The mickey. One mickey is equal to the smallest detectable amount that a computer mouse can move.

2. Sheds, Barns and Outhouses. These are nuclear physics units, used to quantify the scattering cross-section of very small particle.

3. The nibble. One nibble is 4 bits, or half a byte.

4. The shake. 10 nanoseconds. As in "of a lamb's tail".

5. The jiffy. A computing term, measuring the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. About 0.01 seconds.

6. The microfortnight. 1.2096. Created by nerds to stop people whinging about how things that were supposed to take only a "second" didn't actually take exactly a second.

Measuring Up #1

I've been doing a bit of reading about measurement, and it's surprisingly interesting.

The metric system, for instance. Did you know there are only three countries in the world who haven't adopted the metric system? Liberia, Burma and the United States of America. What excellent company the US keeps.

Let's take a look at the battle of the measurments, Imperial vs Metric.

1 litre of liquid weighs 1 kilo. 78.9382 litres is 78.9382 kilos. This seems sensible.

But in America...

1 pint of liquid weighs 1.0431758 pounds. You want to tell me how much 78.9382 pints weighs without using a calculator?

Obviously not the best example of the many benefits of the Imperial measurement system. Let's try distance.

There are 1000 millimetres in a metre. 1000 metres in a kilometre.

And 12 inches in a foot. And 33/50 feet in a link. And 25 links in a rod. And 4 rods in a chain. And 80 chains in a mile.

Totally makes sense.

Senator Obama, if you're reading this (which I know you are), you might want to consider a bit of a rethink on the whole measuring-stuff front.