begin rant
On the net one often encounters people who advocate preserving and revitalizing endangered languages, but who advocate abolishing the colorful Anglo-American system of measurements and replacing it with the metric system.
I submit for your consideration the idea that these are contradictory wishes. If we should help the Lakota people, for example, keep their language and culture alive, why should we fight the American people who want to keep inches, Fahrenheit and pounds alive? You cannot drive in two directions at once. Either you are in favor of letting localities keep their own culture, or you are in favor of a dumbed-down Euros and kilometers culture for all 7 billion of us everywhere including those in orbit.
By the way, the strongest argument in favor of keeping pounds and ounces, inches and feet, is the very argument often brought up in opposition to them: the math is harder. Yes, it's harder to add seven and seven eighths inches plus two and a third feet, THANK GOD. Stop thinking about sex and TV and Facebook for a minute and use your f--king brain for something other than a head-implosion-preventing placeholder.
end rant
For con-culturing I like to think of units of measurement based on things that are readily available. Why not a unit of length based on the height of the average human adult, and a unit of liquid volume based on average bladder capacity? And naturally these units have to be subdivided into halves, quarters, 8ths and so forth, rather than 10ths. When you are out in the real world it is much easier to fold a piece of paper into equal halves and quarters, than it is to fold it into 10 equal parts. And if you know that piece of paper is 1/6 of a human-height length-unit tall, you can use it to measure things.
Likewise you can divide a quantity of liquid into halves by pouring it alternately into two equal-size containers. Easier than dividing it into 10ths. You see, 8ths and 16ths are natural, like tropical rainforests and dolphins. Units that divide into 10ths are unnatural, like coal-burning power plants and nuclear weapons.
01 August 2010
systems of measurement
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3 comments:
Γιάννης Α., I think you might have missed the bit before the proposed alternative system where Mr. Harrison began the paragraph with "For con-culturing", which suggests that he's not seriously proposing a new system for day to day use (and not necessarily a system for human use!), but rather, suggesting that people creating con-cultures "think outside the box" a bit. Metric measures are a bit arbitrary too - the metre was originally intended as one ten-millionth of the distance from the north pole to the equator, along some arbitrary meridian (it's no longer defined as such - it's now "the distance travelled by light in vacuum in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second". I can't say I agree with preserving multiple systems of measurement for day to day use, preferring metric personally (and it seems to be the most widely recognized standard) and disliking unnecessary conversions, and frankly I prefer working in decimals to working in fractions.
Closer to the subject at hand, I'm glad this was brought up, as I hadn't given much thought before to creating units of measure (well, not for a long, long time, at least), so I'm glad to have read it.
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