Yes, it’s from a book called “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader” and that book was resting on a closed toilet seat in a nation that only kind of uses the metric system in certain situations… however, you’d be surprised how much you can learn after a single visit to any local fast-food joint!
I use centimeters for certain things, but I call them “inches”.
And the fact that Inch is not precisly defined. “Three grains of …” or “King’s thumb” is not a precise definition.
The paragraph on the meter should mention that their measuring error from the pole to the equator was .02%, which, without using satellites or even electricity, is fucking impressive.
That is impressive & a nice amendment on your part. Thank you for the added detail
So how the hell was it done? Long piece of rope? Hot air balloon? Or having a bird fly from one point to another and timing it?
Calculations. In 240 BCE, Eratosthenes used a stick. He basically found a place where the sun was directly overhead, and measured the shadow from a stick a known distance to the north of that location. He approximated the circumference of the earth to be 25,000 miles, which was off by 99 miles.
How do we know the conversion of whatever length unit he was using, in modern units?
Uhh, educated guesses. The stadion wasn’t exactly standardized. Most of the conversions I see put 10 stadia at 1 mile so that’s what I went with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadion_(unit)
The main thing is his methodology was precise.
The metric prefix system is a fantastic invention, akin to the arabic number system. Honestly it’s surprising no one came up with it sooner… but (and I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for this) the metre is an awkward length - it’s too big for human scale measurements. The decimetre is not as bad but still not very good, and it’s also not commonly used. The centimetre has the opposite problem - it’s too small for the human scale but too big for precision work.
Don’t get me wrong, the horrible conversions between imperial units make the system unusable for me, but the unit lengths themselves are scaled to humans because they weren’t initially defined arbitrarily by some committee (why should the distance from the pole to the equator be used as the baseline for a measurement used by humans?). I think the inch and foot are great lengths to use on a daily basis, they feel quite natural.
What annoys me the most is that we could have had the best of both, since the foot and inch are only a factor of 12 apart, so we could have had a metre measuring about one foot and a decimetre measuring about an inch.
What? The whole idea of the prefix system is that it’s granular enough that you can describe any size as up to 100s (or 10s of common sizes) of any prefix.
Think of it as scales: Metres is the unit for things people sized (including kids), decimeters for things hand sized, centimeters for grit sized, etc.
Other scales are mostly an extension of the system: Kilometers is “away” sized, millimeters are tiny sized, and following the convention of 10s makes for easy to remember and translate conversions, although I’ll admit that they aren’t inherently more convenient than other measures.
Similarily: foot is stick sized, an inch is pebble sized, but the imperial system then doesn’t easily convert between other common human experiences. Talking of things seed sized becomes weird fractional math, figuring out how many steps it is to the next town (miles I’d argue is “trip” sized) gets weird. And when you need higher precision you end up in fractions of a larger unit rather than convenient ones.
The size of an atom is about 100 pikometers (10e-12 metres) and a molecule about a nanometer (10x the size). In US customary an atom is about 1/262144 (2^18) thou of an inch, and molecules about 1/2048 (2^11) thou of an inch. And if we want it compared to miles or feet, we’ll have to redo the calculations from scratch with loads of danger of messing up conversion numbers.
Besides, most of the benefit of the metric system is that the standardised scale prefixes makes it very easy to correlate all other physical constants. Speed of light is just under 300 km/s, which is about 300 m/ms or 300 mm/ns, or 200 miles/second which is about 1000 ft/ms or 10 in/ns (not to mention that rounding errors are larger in customary)
EtA: I do wish we had a base 12 math system though
why should the distance from the pole to the equator be used as the baseline for a measurement used by humans?
For both philosophical and scientific reasons, they wanted a definition that could be recreated any where in the world, certainly not the thumb or foot of any one man. With the “distance from pole to equator” definition, you just need to measure a long north-south axis (say a few hundreds km), and knowledge about the figure of the Earth helps you scale that to the full definition. You can do that anywhere on Earth.
Another considered definition was the length of a pendulum whose half period is 1s, but even at the time the effect of local gravity was deemed to be too much
That’s not the point I’m trying to make. You can derive a length from any number of physical constants to make it reproducible, but considering the divisor of exactly ten million suggests the metric committee were far more interested in making something ‘clean’ than something human-friendly. They could have basically done what they do with the modern redefinitions of the metre - the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 ths of a second. Obviously they chose that number to keep the definition in line with the original, but they could have done that with the original definition to make the metre basically any length they wanted, but they didn’t.
Uncle John’s bathroom reader!
I know this has nothing to do with the metric system, but I saw the toilet paper roll around the page number and got a surge of happy brain sauce due to the happy memories of all the copies I owned through the years: 2I think this snippet misrepresents the accuracy of the former definition of the metre. Sure, it’s no longer the distance from the equator to the pole (the modern definition uses the speed of light and the period of transition for a particular atom), but the difference is quite small. The circumference of the Earth around the poles (so 4 times the distance from equator to pole) is 40007.863 km. In Napoleonic times scientists had a pretty good idea what the shape of the Earth was.
Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates. Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.
Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.
Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.
Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.
This reads like an unfortunate confluence of psychosis, psychoactive substances and LLMs.
While I can’t speak for my chemical imbalances, I can certainly assure you I am %100 not a fucking algorithm or some lame ass excuse for manufactured digital intelligence…
Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.
Thanks for explaining that a fucking ball is easier to squeeze at it’s widest part, genius.
What are you talking about? That isn’t what they said, and a ball doesn’t have a widest point. That’s more or less the definition of a ball.
The distance between the two poles is smaller than the distance from one side to the other following the equator. The earth isn’t quite a ball, it’s a bit squashed because of way it spins
Okay, a ball is equally wide but sometimes it gets squeezed and becomes tallish
To agree on a unified measurement system for things like engineering, science and commerce across nations and cultures is a question of practicability though, not pseudophilosophical ramblings.
I say we measure everything with how angry it makes the French.
I have this book, its great! Some funny bullshit in there
Hmm… What We Did Before Smartphones. I should write a book so the Young’s dont forget ye olden ways.
If we were to make a meter today, I would think it would be a fraction of the speed of light.
And on that note, I honestly think a base 12 number system would be easier in the long run.
Heyyy I’ve got two of Uncle John’s books on the commode right now!
Love me some Uncle John’s. I’d recognize that page number decorator anywhere!
Uncle John knows the correct way to mount toilet paper.
I have two bathrooms and do both.
The real question is; which do I use for my personal lou or WC or wash closet or bathroom or powder room or shitter?
If you don’t want to offend anyone, just leave the spool sitting upright on the lid
Or an apology note and a bucket full of water
Or three seashells
Someone so consistently responding to themselves is pretty entertaining.
So we only know a kilogram of water weighs a kilogram because of an arbitrary decision by the French? How much does it really weigh?
Ever since that dude translated the Rosetta stone they’ve been up their own asses.
I mean yeah, Metric scales.
Everything can be scaled. 1 can be two halves & 3 can be 12 .025’s. or we can all just agree that everything is based on various systems of measurement invented by humans who can hardly agree on their own origins and the purpose of their existence, or even the right to exist.
Facts to remember the next time some French guy on the internet makes fun of Freedom Units™. The Metric system is basically arbitrarily defined as well, since the thing they meant to base it on was incorrect.
Edit: I forgot the /sarcasm tag and pissed off some French guys on the internet.
Hey it’s me some French guy on the internet. I think the main argument for the metric system is how they all connect together in a simple way. 1km is 1000m, one cube meter of water is 1000L, etc. We don’t really care what the base unit is.
This sounds like something a sassy person might say whilst pushing up their glasses to view a document which is rolled up tightly into a scroll and shoved into their own anus after they realize the room is watching them try to read the outside of a butthole scroll.
Sacré bleu!!!
