<story><title>Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)</title><url>https://petersmagnusson.org/2009/09/15/why-are-there-5280-feet-in-a-mile/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtkwe</author><text>&amp;gt;  but almost no one advocates for metric time&lt;p&gt;People would love to but there are some nasty fractions left over if you try to impose a base 10 unit of time at any level above a day.&lt;p&gt;Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there&amp;#x27;s not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use.&lt;p&gt;Also 10 days to a week is pretty long unless you include a break in the middle.</text></item><item><author>dalbasal</author><text>A Bernard Cornwell novel about king arthur introduced me to all sorts of defunct, proto-english &amp;amp; welsh counting systems. Shepards used one system. Sailors used another. Soldiers another. It was part of a society that was deeply dialectic in all things, especially language.&lt;p&gt;This resonated with me, because my grandfather had sheep. Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. Sheep were sold in dozen and half-dozen dividable lots. Land in acres. In his region, one acre could feed one cow and one sheep so they had an intuitive serendipity. 100 acres made a viable farm.&lt;p&gt;Measurement systems tend to leave even more vestiges than other elements of language. Most of the world uses metrics, but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Square kms never became an agricultural measure of land because one is bigger than most farms. Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric. They were close enough. Acres weren&amp;#x27;t, so there is no metric acre.&lt;p&gt;There are sixty minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle because sumerians used a base 60 numerical system 5 thousand years ago. I have never even heard of a metric angular unit.&lt;p&gt;I totally accept the fact that metric systems are better.  Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. OTOH, the richness and embedded history of language is valuable too. There&amp;#x27;s a reason esperanto never caught on, even though it&amp;#x27;s arguably the right tool for the job.</text></item><item><author>Jedd</author><text>&amp;gt; The problem with these versions is that they don’t explain why this collision between furlong and mile occurred around 1600, and not centuries before. It implies, therefore, that people suddenly woke up and realized, hey, wait a second, if there’s 660 feet in a furlong … and eight furlongs in a mile … but 5000 feet in a mile …. wait a second !?!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; hard to guess why the broken system lasted so long (delightful and interesting explanation of TFA notwithstanding), and consequently why it was replaced by a different broken system.&lt;p&gt;95% of people on this planet use, understand, and advocate metric, in which an area of 100 metres x 100 metres = 1 hectare (10,000 sq m).&lt;p&gt;A 10 x 10 grid of hectares = a square kilometre.&lt;p&gt;A millimetre of rain falling across one hectare means you&amp;#x27;ve received 10,000 litres of water.&lt;p&gt;That volume of water has a mass of 10,000 kilograms (or 10 tonne).&lt;p&gt;Wait a second, indeed!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pklausler</author><text>Vernor Vinge&amp;#x27;s excellent novel &lt;i&gt;A Deepness In The Sky&lt;/i&gt;, which is mostly set aboard spacecraft disconnected from planetary time cylces, uses metric measurements of time (namely Ksec and Msec), and part of the fun of reading the book was figuring out what those units meant intuitively when a character mentioned that something would take a couple Ksec to do.&lt;p&gt;(It helped a bit to remember Adm. Grace Hopper&amp;#x27;s rule of thumb that &amp;quot;pi seconds is a nanocentury&amp;quot;.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)</title><url>https://petersmagnusson.org/2009/09/15/why-are-there-5280-feet-in-a-mile/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rtkwe</author><text>&amp;gt;  but almost no one advocates for metric time&lt;p&gt;People would love to but there are some nasty fractions left over if you try to impose a base 10 unit of time at any level above a day.&lt;p&gt;Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there&amp;#x27;s not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use.&lt;p&gt;Also 10 days to a week is pretty long unless you include a break in the middle.</text></item><item><author>dalbasal</author><text>A Bernard Cornwell novel about king arthur introduced me to all sorts of defunct, proto-english &amp;amp; welsh counting systems. Shepards used one system. Sailors used another. Soldiers another. It was part of a society that was deeply dialectic in all things, especially language.&lt;p&gt;This resonated with me, because my grandfather had sheep. Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. Sheep were sold in dozen and half-dozen dividable lots. Land in acres. In his region, one acre could feed one cow and one sheep so they had an intuitive serendipity. 100 acres made a viable farm.&lt;p&gt;Measurement systems tend to leave even more vestiges than other elements of language. Most of the world uses metrics, but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Square kms never became an agricultural measure of land because one is bigger than most farms. Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric. They were close enough. Acres weren&amp;#x27;t, so there is no metric acre.&lt;p&gt;There are sixty minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle because sumerians used a base 60 numerical system 5 thousand years ago. I have never even heard of a metric angular unit.&lt;p&gt;I totally accept the fact that metric systems are better.  Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. OTOH, the richness and embedded history of language is valuable too. There&amp;#x27;s a reason esperanto never caught on, even though it&amp;#x27;s arguably the right tool for the job.</text></item><item><author>Jedd</author><text>&amp;gt; The problem with these versions is that they don’t explain why this collision between furlong and mile occurred around 1600, and not centuries before. It implies, therefore, that people suddenly woke up and realized, hey, wait a second, if there’s 660 feet in a furlong … and eight furlongs in a mile … but 5000 feet in a mile …. wait a second !?!&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; hard to guess why the broken system lasted so long (delightful and interesting explanation of TFA notwithstanding), and consequently why it was replaced by a different broken system.&lt;p&gt;95% of people on this planet use, understand, and advocate metric, in which an area of 100 metres x 100 metres = 1 hectare (10,000 sq m).&lt;p&gt;A 10 x 10 grid of hectares = a square kilometre.&lt;p&gt;A millimetre of rain falling across one hectare means you&amp;#x27;ve received 10,000 litres of water.&lt;p&gt;That volume of water has a mass of 10,000 kilograms (or 10 tonne).&lt;p&gt;Wait a second, indeed!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dalbasal</author><text>We&amp;#x27;re locked into days and years, but months, weeks, hours and minutes are arbitrary, no?&lt;p&gt;Maybe we can&amp;#x27;t rationalize it all, but what&amp;#x27;s to stop us from dividing a day into 10 hours with 100 minutes each? Fuck seconds.</text></comment>