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Nearly Everything You Need to Know About Weights and Measures

And I saw in those days how long cords were given to two angels… 'Why have they taken those cords and gone off?' And he said to me, 'They have gone to measure.’


--The Book of Enoch

 

American Customary and British Imperial Weights and Measures


The Megalithic Yard


Biblical Weights and Measures


Old Northern Linear Measure


Some Japanese Measures


How long is an inch?


Essay: The Metric System's Ugly Secret


Metric Basics


Exact Values for Capacity and Mass(Includes exact customary/imperial relationships and the mysterious relationship between the kilogram and the liter)


Some Notes on Temperature


Counting Systems Compared(Here I compare decimal, dozenal (duodecimal), hexadecimal, and octal number bases.)


A Dozenal Alternative to the Metric System


Counting in Dozenal(I am very proud of this one. It is a comprehensive list of proposed duodecimal names, including scientific notation and prefixes. I dare say that this is more comprehensive than our current decimal system.)


Dozenal Characters(This is a review of the best proposals for the two new single-digit numbers we will need if we switch to duodecimal.)


Dozenal Time(Okay, assume we did change to duodecimal. What would time keeping be like? You're fooling yourself if you think it's just as easy as slapping some new numbers on the clock face. Herein, I give two reasonable proposals for a dozenal clock.)


A Quick Octal Proposal(A base 8 counting system would be splendid in its simplicity. This document contains some notes I jotted -- it literally took me about 20 minutes, so don't read this with an expectation of my usual attention to detail.)


Toward a New Metric-Based Customary(A few suggestions to tweak the avoirdupois, troy, and American liquid capacity measurements. This also contains a dialogue outlining why America hasn't gone metric.)


Other Measurement Web Pages

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"Nature does not put up with monocultures because they are too easy to attack; if everything looks just alike, it will promptly be punished."

--Daniel Geer, AtStake (computer security company)

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Weights & Measures