[time-nuts] Obscure terms

Lux, Jim (337C) james.p.lux at jpl.nasa.gov
Thu Aug 20 23:17:56 UTC 2009




On 8/20/09 3:16 PM, "Jim Palfreyman" <jim77742 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sheez - I'm so glad we have metric!!
> 
> Can I ask you US dudes a question?
> 
> Do you know, without looking it up, what an acre is?

Of course we do, it's 43,560 square feet, but that's not what's important.
There are 640 acres in a square mile (aka "a section"), which gets divided
up into quarters (160 acres each, a quarter section), and then quarters
within that (40 acres each, which is how much land you get under the
Homestead Act.. As in "40 acres and a mule").   Those 40 acres are, of
course, a quarter mile on a side.  The 40 acres is usually then subdivided
into 10 acre chunks, either square (2x2 within the 40 acres, a furlong on a
side) or rectangular (1x4, a quarter mile long and a 1/16th mile wide). You
then have to subdivide the 10 acres, which gets a bit dicier.

I usually think of an acre is a bit bigger than a 200x200 ft.

Miles are a real old unit (1000 paces of a Roman Legion)

One sees measurements of land in rods and chains.  The rod is 16.5 feet, the
chain is 66 feet.  This may seem weird, but a chain is 1/10th of a furlong,
and a 10 square chains is an acre. The rod is 1/4 of a chain.  This kind of
thing is handy for measuring out land.  There are also "links" which are
1/100 of a chain (because the actual measuring chain isn't chain, but is a
series of linked bars).

A cricket pitch is a chain long, I think.

We won't even get into the French system of perches, etc. (If you live in
the US and you're buying land in Louisiana, perches and arpents are
important to you)



The acre is a very old and useful unit, and derives from the amount of land
(in England, I might add) one can usefully farm singlehandedly.  There's a
quarter acre unit too (the rood).  I think the furlong also derives from
farming practice (something about how long a furrow can be).

While these units seem bizarre, they're no more unusual in some sense than
choosing a second as the time measure; ostensibly the period of your
heartbeat, although it could just as easily be divided down from 24 hours,
60 minutes/hour 60 seconds/hour (as my daughter used to say: curse those
Babylonians and doing everything with fractions, rather than civilized
decimals). 

And hey, the meter is just 1/10,000,000 of the distance from equator to
pole, since it was invented during the craze of decimalization that
afflicted the French during the revolution... Here on Time-Nuts, shouldn't
we be advocating for the rationalized decimal system of time: 10 hours per
day, 100 minutes/hr, 100 seconds/minute. Or, gods forbid, we could use
Swatch time.. 1000 beats to the day. (or is it ".beat", Swatch was going to
launch a satellite into orbit that broadcast "internet time" in beats (or
.beats).. Fortunately, MIR was abandoned before this could be a reality.


> 
> It's such a commonly used term for measuring large areas, but I bet
> most don't know what it actually is. I only know because of Pink
> Floyd.
> 
> We use a hectare which is 100mx100m. Very easy to visualise, work with
> and convert.

The acre is about as convenient (roughly a quarter of a hectare).. About 70
yards on a side, if it's square.. About 3 minutes walking around.


> 
> Jim Palfreyman
> 
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