2010/5/10 Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>:
> On 5/10/2010 9:36 AM, Mike Lazzari wrote:
>>> For me the only comprehensible distance scale, circa 1/40000000 the
>>> circumference of our planet ...
>>>
>> A rather esoteric, arbitrary starting point. Too bad the ivory tower crowd
>> developed what could have been a very useful and logical system.
>>
>>
> The old, sort of English system still in common use here makes a lot of
> sense to me at the level of living personal life. An inch is the length
> of the end part of my index finger, the span of the four fingers of my
> hand is 6 in., my foot is about a foot long, elbow to fingertip is 18
> in., the distance from nose to fingertip stretched out to the side is a
> yard, and thus the span of my reach is two yards or six feet.
>
I'm not saying one is better than the other, I just grew up in the
metric system.
So for me it is very logical that my little finger has 1cm width,
thumb is 2,5 cm long, the span of thumb to index is 20 cm (for my
hands) so five spans is one meter... our bricks are metric, being 19
cm long, 4 high and 9 deep, add 1cm of joint and a classic wall is
easily to count. Just to say it is all just a matter of convention. A
step is about a meter... My kids count in Euromoney, I still count in
Belgian Francs subconsciously (and thereby think, boy what is
everything expensive!)
Two villages are about 10 km apart, two larger ones 20 km, etc... it
is all indeed just arbitrary. Napoleon lost here in Waterloo, but left
a very big heritage. Just like we living in one far too big timezone
in Europe because of WWII.
Iwert (1.78m)
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