[time-nuts] Obscure terms

Don Latham djl at montana.com
Fri Aug 21 23:02:25 UTC 2009


Unit of land area in Denmark is the <barrel>, the area of land needed to 
grow a barrel of grain.
Don
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lux, Jim (337C)" <james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov>
To: "Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement" 
<time-nuts at febo.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 5:17 PM
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] Obscure terms


>
>
>
> On 8/20/09 3:16 PM, "Jim Palfreyman" <jim77742 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sheez - I'm so glad we have metric!!
>>
>> Can I ask you US dudes a question?
>>
>> 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.
>
>
>>
>> It's such a commonly used term for measuring large areas, but I bet
>> most don't know what it actually is. I only know because of Pink
>> Floyd.
>>
>> We use a hectare which is 100mx100m. Very easy to visualise, work with
>> and convert.
>
> The acre is about as convenient (roughly a quarter of a hectare).. About 
> 70
> yards on a side, if it's square.. About 3 minutes walking around.
>
>
>>
>> Jim Palfreyman
>>
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>
>
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