Weights and Measures

The “meter” has a “non-uniform but simetrical X-shaped form”.

On the other side, it would be nice to know the history of feet and inches!
(I’m not from one of the “three countries”!)

Well, we’ve faced uphill battles before as a nation, and surely can conquer the world with the clearly-superior feet and inches system.

An inch at a time, as it were.

http://www.badlandscaping.com

What is the origin of the imperial system…

http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Metrication/metric_land.htm

Not as dumb as the world would like you to believe…

That article was written by a luddite idiot who thinks cooking is more important than global scientific cooperation

loooove this one! only three, how funny! 

mmm.. that’s why I hated the metric system. It’s based on archaic scientific “constants” which have incredibly abstruse situational needs.The length of a swinging pendulum, timed to a distance based on calculations (converting the existing “feet” into the new “meter”, or do you think they took a giant string, ran it around the globe [careful not to hit any of the spots on the earth that might be higher or lower than the average] and divided it into 10,000,000 pieces). Then that measurement is used to create a brass rod of some rather archaic length to be the new meter, but of course that stretches and contracts and corrodes and generally falls apart with age, so platinum is used, and that’s based on the length of the brass rod, which may have contracted or expanded over its lifetime. (see how far removed we are from the original “length of a pendulum definition already,), but now there’s the issue of expansion and contraction due to heat! GASP! so another rod is made based on the old platinum rod (we definitely like rods in the metric system don’t we??) except thisa time we use an alloy that probably doesn’t shrink as much, and it needs to be at a specific tempurature (also metric, though the metric tempurature system, in its original form, makes a hell of a lot of sense).But still not specific enough! atmospheric pressure may affect a meter! so we need to set this bar now on two discs measuring a certain number of milliimeters (now wait, are these milliimeters, instrumental to measuring the “official” meter, based on some other official meter, or is the official milliimeter held elsewhere??) apart, and at a standardized metric atmospheric pressure (probably measured in the equally abstruse “kilogram”). Of course this system isn’t perfect enough! So we’ll use something purely mathematical and even more obscure! We’ll use the radiation wavelength of a decaying atom between two particular states – oh screw it, we’ll take however many meters light was suppose to travel in a second and say that defines a meter.A foot though, kind of just came about as “this much” and was based on a fairly useful (practical to the common man, I mean) amount at the time. Eventually that was standardized somewhat, and even to this day, in most applications (most) rough measurements work just fine.