Jay Nugent wrote: > Greetings, > > On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Lee wrote: > > > Jay Nugent wrote: > > > > >Snip
> > > Too bad we blew it back in the late 70's, early 80's when we were > > > *supposed* to move over to the metric system. Base-10 is FAR better a > > > measurement scale than Base-the-kings-feet and other arbitrary scales. > > > > Metric is just as arbitrary as a king's foot being 12 inches long rather than 10 >and > > 36 inches from tip of his nose to finger tips. In the universe there's nothing more > > arbitrary than the circumference of the Earth or boiling and freezing point of >pure > > water at one standard Earth atmosphere. > > Yeah, but how do you start from scratch unless you happen to have the > king's body laying around somewhere. At least with a *water* standard, > your referance is available in abundance on the vast majority of the > planet. There was only ONE king and he's pretty rotted away by now so we > can't really be sure that our measurement system is even in calibration > anymore... ;-) We can recalibrate against a water standard at anytime. > > --- Jay Actual we don't need to. The US bureau of Standards maintains a metal standard for the inch, foot, yard in a temperature controled environment along with metric and atomic standards for wave length standards. As far as pure water there is no such thing in the universe. Any planet that has sufficient atmosphere pressure and te mperature to maintain water in the liquid state also has gasepus impurities that end up in the water effecting it's boilling and freezing points. > > > "Those that sacrifice essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety > deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Ben Franklin (1759) > +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > | Jay Nugent [EMAIL PROTECTED] (734)971-1076 (734)971-4529/Fax | > | Nugent Telecommunications [www.nuge.com] (734)649-0850/Cell | > | Internet Consulting/Linux SysAdmin/Engineering & Design/ISP Reseller | > | ISP Monitoring [www.ispmonitor.net] ISP & Modem Performance Monitoring | > | Web-Pegasus [www.webpegasus.com] Web Hosting/DNS Hosting/Shell Accts| > | LinuxNIC, Inc. [www.linuxnic.net] Registrar of the .linux TLD | > +------------------------------------------------------------------------+ > 11:00pm up 22 days, 19:44, 7 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00 > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-users mailing list > Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list Archives, Digests, etc at http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
