This is not a proctology joke, it's an actual measurement...
There are fewer rods per mile if he is the one measuring than if she is
Pics at this link; text at the link below.
coach) in a general science class force us to convert every possible equation to furlongs per fortnight. Never got over it.
especially if you haven't studied for the driver's test
The math will bail you out.
if you want to know how many drinks in a Rehoboam
No one can possibly explain troy ounce versus avoirdupois ounce
If anyone cares Napoleon was average height for his time (5'6"). His listed height of 5'2" used the French inch which was longer than the English inch (gee that sounds dirty)
Does it convert to furlongs?
...legal descriptions are still written in the style of metes and bounds with distances in chains. This comes down to us from the practice of surveyors in merrye olde England using actual metal-link chains to measure courses for property delineation. By the 17th century this was all standardized, with 320 rods to the mile, 4 rods to the chain, 66 feet to the chain, etc.
There are interesting vestiges of the old system. Most rights of way in the city of Chicago are 66 feet (one chain or 4 rods) in width for the major streets and 33 feet (2 rods) for the side streets. Alleys are generally 16 feet or about 1 rod.
have wanted to drive 700 miles with a dead body when Lake Erie was 30 miles away? Just drive down the road a half an hour, hop in your boat (one of those gangsters had to have a boat) and poof, he's perch food. And Lake Huron's a good bit deeper and only about 50 miles away... Who wants to spend 2 days in a car with a stinky corpse to get to the freakin' Meadowlands?
(and surely, someone in Michigan had pigs...)
What were we talking about?
Like all organic, traditional units of measurement, the rod was derived from real things: the staffs used by surveyors. There were so many links in a chain, so many chains in a rod, so many rods in a furlong, etc.
I have attempted to memorize this particular conversion before and failed. Edit: and it appears I was even more wrong than I recalled, because chain is the larger measurement and rod the smaller.
and other than the clock, makes a hell of a lot more sense.
The base units are---or were in the first iteration---derived from particular relationships to real-world measurements, but they're abstracted: nobody needs, in a practical sense, to have the earth's circumference be an even number of units, or a unit of mass that equals the weight of water of such and such a volume at sea level. It wasn't as if the people who invented it assigned names to a standardized version of units already in use: they intentionally departed from that kind of system.
Which makes sense, given that the goal was to achieve scalability through decimalization. And that, in its way, is a sensible approach to a system. But it's sterile and inhuman in many ways, too.
A pints a pound the world around is no more meaningful tan a milliliter of water equals a gram.
Memorizing conversions it's time better spent on basic computation, or reading or even doodling.
Rods and chains weren't arbitrary, they were derived from actual tools used by surveyors to measure property. They were the opposite of arbitrary; they were organic.
What they were was cumbersome, which was a different, though real, problem.
Those lengths were the very definition of arbitrary.
The French Imperial system's foot was actually 1.066 ft. long.
The guy they literally used as the unit of length to measure the bridge later became the chairman of ANSI and the president of ISO? No joke?
rod is.
And I join you in not having a clue what a rod is.
outside NDN headquarters, of posters willing to show you.
...allegedly.
Show you what, I don't know.