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More excited than Tigger on speed

Post 421

SashaQ - happysad

Yes indeed. It's like they used to say on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - "a question's only easy if you know the answer"...

I've been watching 2011 Chases on Saturday's recently. Last night's was excellent, with two disabled people v The Beast in the final chase - he was confident of demolishing them because he knows his pop culture knowledge is weak, but he assumed theirs would be too because they were older. They pushed him back on pop questions 6 times and won with just a second to spare smiley - biggrin


More excited than Tigger on speed

Post 422

ITIWBS

According to legend, the length of the yard was established in English law by Henry I of England as the distance between the tip of his nose and the tip of his thumb.

Henry I was a little bigger than I am, my own yard (36 inches) is the distance from the center of my breast bone to the tip of my longest finger.

The traditional cubit is half that distance.

The original fathom is twice that distance, the distance spanned between outstretched arms

The Roman pace, originally just two steps, is approximately equal to a fathom.

The original Roman mile was a thousand Roman paces, but the mile has been redefined many ways over time.

Of course, with anthropomorphic measures, given the considerable difference in size between different people, however useful the anthropometric measure may be when fitting clothes or designing custom furniture, the variation is too great to make anthropomorphic standards adequate for commerce.

Other anthropomorphic measures, the original cup was the amount of water one could lift between one's 'cupped' hands, two cups of water make a pint and a pint of water (or grain, or meal, or beer...) became a standard for a pound weight.

The international metric system is a geocentric system established from an estimate of 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole taken as the basic distance measure, represents a rediscovery of the classical system of measures used by the Greeks in the design of the Parthenon, the Olympic meter, taken from the height of the architraves on the sides of the Parthenon, differing from the modern meter by less than a quarter inch.

If it had been me, and one were to go with a geocentric standard, I'd have instead simply have made the standard Earth gravity equal to 10 meters per second squared and worked out the other standard measures from that.


More excited than Tigger on speed

Post 423

Gingersnapper+Keeper of the Cookie Jar and Stuff and Nonsense

~ WOW ~ . .. .smiley - bubbly, ,, ,,,


More excited than Tigger on speed

Post 424

Prof Animal Chaos.C.E.O..err! C.E.Idiot of H2G2 Fools Guild (Official).... A recipient of S.F.L and S.S.J.A.D.D...plus...S.N.A.F.U.

smiley - winkeyeI've got a foot, but I don't use it as a rule smiley - whistle

smiley - biggrin


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