For the Gotye fans:
For the Gotye fans:
something i've just made that's pretty meta:
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Last edited by Saeran; 2012-05-26 at 02:08 AM.
Damn nature you scary!
22 miles of hard road
33 years of tough luck
44 skulls buried in the ground
Crawling down through the muck
Ah yeah...
Imperial measurements were not arbitrary numbers. In this day and age the metric system probably makes most sense, but it's not as though the imperial system was decided on by rolling dice. The units had very real, practical uses. What's more, the imperial system remains in use across the world, in mostly former British-empire countries but also in many Asian and northern African countries.
Agree about the date thing, though as any programmer will tell you, YYYY-MM-DD makes the most sense.
OT, from Text From Dog:
Dragonslayer Hoddie - pretending to know what I'm doing!
the imperial system might not seem logical at first, but as someone else mentioned, the system is pretty logical if you look at the past. one inch used to be called a thumb and was as long as a thumb thumb. for longer distances, they had the foot, which, you guessed it, is as long as an average foot. after that, you had the yard, which was about an arms length from shoulder to wrist, or in some jurisdictions from nose to thumb. finally, the mile is thought to come from the latin for thousand paces, one pace being 2 steps or about 1.4 yards.
the problem with these measurements was that, because they were dependant on body lengths, they were variable from person to person. many families even went so far as to send the person with the biggest feet to the store for cloth, because cloth was sold by the foot. around 1450, British legislation sought to end this, giving the inch, the foot, the yard and the mile government mandated lengths, with one inch being 3 dried barley seeds put one after another (barley seeds are usually pretty uniform in length). the foot and yard were in that same law connected to the inch. The mile wasn't linked to the inch until several hundred years later.
the pound was made out to be 7000 grains, but the ounce was the only measurement to be an arbitrary part of another measurement without historical background.
now for a funny image: