[time-nuts] Obscure terms

GandalfG8 at aol.com GandalfG8 at aol.com
Thu Aug 20 23:40:43 UTC 2009


 
In a message dated 21/08/2009 00:18:40 GMT Daylight Time,  
james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov writes:
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DON'T YOU JUST WISH SOMETIMES THAT YOU NEVER ASKED???
 
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> Do you know, without looking it up, what an acre is?

Of  course we do, it's 43,560 square feet, but that's not what's important.
There  are 640 acres in a square mile (aka "a section"), which gets divided
up into  quarters (160 acres each, a quarter section), and then quarters
within that  (40 acres each, which is how much land you get under the
Homestead Act.. As  in "40 acres and a mule").   Those 40 acres are, of
course, a  quarter mile on a side.  The 40 acres is usually then subdivided
into 10  acre chunks, either square (2x2 within the 40 acres, a furlong on a
side) or  rectangular (1x4, a quarter mile long and a 1/16th mile wide). You
then have  to subdivide the 10 acres, which gets a bit dicier.

I usually think of an  acre is a bit bigger than a 200x200 ft.

Miles are a real old unit (1000  paces of a Roman Legion)

One sees measurements of land in rods and  chains.  The rod is 16.5 feet, 
the
chain is 66 feet.  This may seem  weird, but a chain is 1/10th of a furlong,
and a 10 square chains is an acre.  The rod is 1/4 of a chain.  This kind of
thing is handy for measuring  out land.  There are also "links" which are
1/100 of a chain (because  the actual measuring chain isn't chain, but is a
series of linked  bars).

A cricket pitch is a chain long, I think.

We won't even get  into the French system of perches, etc. (If you live in
the US and you're  buying land in Louisiana, perches and arpents are
important to  you)



The acre is a very old and useful unit, and derives from the  amount of land
(in England, I might add) one can usefully farm  singlehandedly.  There's a
quarter acre unit too (the rood).  I  think the furlong also derives from
farming practice (something about how  long a furrow can be).

While these units seem bizarre, they're no more  unusual in some sense than
choosing a second as the time measure; ostensibly  the period of your
heartbeat, although it could just as easily be divided  down from 24 hours,
60 minutes/hour 60 seconds/hour (as my daughter used to  say: curse those
Babylonians and doing everything with fractions, rather than  civilized
decimals). 

And hey, the meter is just 1/10,000,000 of the  distance from equator to
pole, since it was invented during the craze of  decimalization that
afflicted the French during the revolution... Here on  Time-Nuts, shouldn't
we be advocating for the rationalized decimal system of  time: 10 hours per
day, 100 minutes/hr, 100 seconds/minute. Or, gods forbid,  we could use
Swatch time.. 1000 beats to the day. (or is it ".beat", Swatch  was going to
launch a satellite into orbit that broadcast "internet time" in  beats (or
.beats).. Fortunately, MIR was abandoned before this could be a  reality.







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