The metre originated in the French Revolution

I know the real goal of the republican calendar was to undermine the Church's power by making it so Sundays would fall at random days of the week, and also screw over the workers by leaving them with a worse weekend-to-week ratio.

However, all I ever read about this part of the revolution seems to indicate that people just didn't comply and went to church anyway on Sundays, and also didn't work that day. On that account, I feel likr your quote is kind of partisan. People wouldn't have been left lost and aimlessly drinking on their tenth day because of a lack of God, because they never quit going to church!

The USPS uses decimal time for it's time keeping system. It serves almost no functional advantage.

http://www.nalc3825.com/ETC_clockring_entries.pdf

Slightly unnerving seeing seconds pass by 15.74% faster.

Ahah nice one, thanks for sharing !

Their seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very annoying for any kind of scheduling I’d imagine.

What about 90° per right angle and not 100°?

It made sense to keep some things like angle measurement and time as disruption was too great for very little practical benefit.

I believe it was one out of three possible options (other than degrees and radians) to represent angles on my high school scientific calculator.

Accidentally staying in "grad" mode when cycling through them (DEG -> RAD -> GRAD) was always a concern, especially since the difference between RAD and GRAD was easy to miss on the small LCD display (the indicator was via partial selection of the letters within a mask spelling "DEGRAD").

In some languages, e.g. Norwegian, grad means degree.

No but they had a clean year of 12 months, 30 days each (3 ten-day weeks) plus 5/6 holiday days at the end of the calendar (around the September equinox).

Also, the months were given names by a Poet, and the days had minerals, vertues or plants instead of Saints. The calendar itself was pretty cool.

Honestly, if they had 5 weeks of 6 days each instead of the 3 weeks of 10 days, I'd even call it the perfect calendar.

The pre-metric measurements in France weren’t imperial, but local: units had the same name, but different cities defined them differently. A livre[0] in one village was almost, but not quite, the livre used by the one only a couple toise[1] away.

[0] about a modern pound, depending where you were. Toulouse’s livre was almost 1.3 modern pounds, for example.

[1] about 13853/27000 meter.

There was a 12:1 ratio between the foot ' inch '' line ''' and point '''' in pre-decimal engineering. Yes, they used triple prime marks. The typographic point was originally 1/144th of an inch. Watches are typically measued in french pointes.

Have you read the novel Le rendez-vous de Vénus by Jean-Pierre Luminet? If not you might love ite

Yes, this is a brilliant book, and well worth reading. Another other one in the same vein is "Longitude" by Dava Sobel: https://www.amazon.com/Longitude-Genius-Greatest-Scientific-...

Nohting prevent you to use the metric system and use 60cm (for example) as a base unit for your construction. So you can easily divide it by 12 if you want.

Just one example I'm familiar with. Drywall typically comes in widths of 1200 mm and are mounted on studs 600 mm c/c.

I don't understand your issue between gram and kilo gram: gram is the base unit and the prefix kilo, meaning one thousand just says that 1 kg = 1000 grams. It is exactly the same as meters and kilometers: meters is the base unit and 1 km = 1000 meters.

Reportedly, the kg was going to be called "grav", but it sounded too similar to "Graf", a German feudal rank, and these guys really hated feudalism.

Too few divisors of place values. The idea you would pick something that isn't evenly divisible by at least 3 or 4 was a mistake.

This one isn't metric's fault to be fair. That's just what you get for inventing numbers before inventing math.

Makes me wonder what would have happened if 'French numbers' in base 12, 36 or 60 were introduced at the same time.

People got used to working in octal.or hexadecimal in the past for computers, doesn't seem like it would have been as big of a change as you think.

Yes φ is a constructible number and more generally an algebraic number, solution of the polynomial equation x^2 = x + 1. However π is not, and so is my approximation of φ as 5π/6 - 1. Here non-constructibility (in the mathematical sense) translates to the fact there is no method to "straighten" an arc into a segment using a compass and a ruler. But bear with me because the 5π/6 - 1 approximation of phi has more to say.

First, the "conspiracy theory" that the meter is linked to Earth's dimensions and harmonizes with ancient measurement units through a shared reference actually predates the meter's definition. This idea was a thread of interest among the scientists who developed a universal measurement system – one that could be derived anywhere on the planet.

>One can well sense that it can only be through comparisons of measurements made in ancient times & in our days on monuments still existing, that I can determine to how many of our toises the Geometers of antiquity would have evaluated a degree of Meridian. Now I find, 1st. that the side of the base of the great pyramid of Egypt taken five hundred times; 2nd. that the cubit of the Nilometer taken two hundred thousand times; 3rd. that a stadium existing & measured at Laodicea in Asia Minor, by Mr. Smith, & taken five hundred times; I find, I say, that these three products are each of the same value, & that each in particular is precisely the same measure of a degree [of a Meridian], which has been determined by our modern Geometers.

Alexis-Jean-Pierre Paucton, Metrology, or Treatise on measures, weights and currencies, of the ancients and the moderns, 1780

more context: https://anonpaste.pw/v/71abb0f8-5a03-4cb5-879a-d4f44ad6d57c#...

original: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55491755/f126.item

>Newton was trying to uncover the unit of measurement used by those constructing the pyramids. He thought it was likely that the ancient Egyptians had been able to measure the Earth and that, by unlocking the cubit of the Great Pyramid, he too would be able to measure the circumference of the Earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/dec/06/revealed-isa...

Having said that(-1 downvotes!), let's recap:

This is how we can construct a royal cubit from a circle of diameter = 1m:

https://imgur.com/a/HmnfDKR

φ = 2cos(π/5) lead us to this construction around a pentagon from which we can derive the "pige" or "quine" of cathedral builders (for now consider this is historically true) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pige_(mesure)

https://imgur.com/a/ZqprfAd

What I mentioned earlier was that using a circle-based construction(diameter = 1m), one can derive a non-constructible approximation of φ, namely φ̃ = 5π/6 – 1, with the remarkable property that 0.2 × φ̃² = π/6, thanks to φ² = φ + 1.

But what’s truly elegant is that this process has a symmetric counterpart, where we approximate π using φ. This time, we begin with a constructible triangle, sometimes called the triangle of the builders (1, 2, √5), whose perimeter is:

    t = (1 + 2 + √5)/10

    φ = 5t – 1

    φ = (5 × (3 + √5)/10) – 1 = (1 + √5)/2

    0.2 × φ² = t again

    - the constructible (t from the triangle),
    - the transcendental (π/6 from the circle), and
    - the algebraic (φ² = φ + 1)

For the historically conservative, arguments can be made that these considerations are pseudo-historical, that the "quine of cathedral builders" is an unsubstantiated myth. See the wikipedia link above for the "pige"

or this recent article: https://classiques-garnier.com/aedificare-2021-2-revue-inter...

this one too: http://compagnonsdudevoir.fr/?p=790

>This greatly saddens those who have built an entire "operative" narrative around this kind of knowledge supposedly passed down in secret among the compagnons of the Tour de France for centuries… and have made it their pedestal. The question of how "tradition" is constructed among the compagnons (and incidentally among the Freemasons) remains a taboo that absolutely needs to be broken — and not just for the sake of advancing historical knowledge.

Also this blog post traces the confabulation of the quine to Le Corbusier's Modulor system based on the golden ratio: https://blogruz.blogspot.com/2007/12/en-qui-quine.html

>Le Corbusier considered various sets of proportions, notably using a human height of 1.75 meters, before settling in 1947 on a single set based on a height of 1.83 meters. He chose this because the associated Modulor measurement of 226 cm corresponds to within less than a millimeter of 89 inches — 89 being a number in the Fibonacci sequence that provides some of the best approximations of the golden ratio.

>This system was intended to unite all nations around a universal standard, effectively casting aside the metric system, if not the decimal system entirely. We know how that turned out: the Modulor was essentially used for only one major creation — albeit a significant one — the Cité Radieuse in Marseille, completed in 1952, where all dimensions, down to the built-in furniture, are derived from the Modulor.

Makes you think... The fact we don't have documents isn't surprising given that the campagnons (or later freemasons) communicated practical (then mystical) knowledge esoterically for political reasons (See https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compagnonnage).

Nonetheless, the same motivations and the same quest for harmony (in the obsessive, symbolic sense) can be observed in Le Corbusier. As if the situation follows a geometric progression: in this sense, the "ancients" were as puzzled as we are by unexpected harmonies and actively sought them, and if you look at the historical sequence that lead to the definition of the meter, this is what you find.

Compare the length of a greek foot with a roman foot: 30.87cm vs 29.62cm. The ratio matches 24/25 with 3 nines of precision. 24•25•7 forms a pythagorean triangle. As if the definition of some measurement units were retrofitted to facilitate conversion. If this kind of behavior leads to the formation of a strange graph of quasi-conversions or numerical coincidences, then maybe we could explain the emergence of patterns such as the 5π/6 - 1 approximation of φ without needing to argue for (or against) someone's intention behind what appears as a design choice.

Alternatively the measures of the tools or geometric constructs that drive these conversions are idealized/approximated with a ratio, hence the delusion of the conspiracy theorists. But as I said, "ancients" had the same attitude, in particular with irrational numbers they wished to express as a ratio. Imagine the kind of problem the pseudo-phi <-> pseudo-π/6 complex I desribed above posed to people who where attempting to construct a straight line of length pi using only a compass and a straight-edge and establishing mathematics more rigorously. That's quite a nasty trap. Surely they found themselves in a mindstate that must not be that different from ours. Put in other words, the situation is hyperstionnal, and if we want to understand what is happening (whether this is an illusion or not) I think we should try to tackle this from a cognitive angle and model surprise explicitly.

Some more links:

https://www.messagedelanuitdestemps.org/les-principales-unit...

https://martouf.ch/2021/03/le-metre-une-matrice-universelle-...

Don't forget prescription drugs (mg).

That's part of the point, though. Ikea might not do separate units, but this is not an uncommon practice elsewhere. In the metric example I don't need rounding because I can trivially see 4m 3cm and know it's 403cm. With inches I'd have to do multiplication to handle mixed units.

but you have to do math to convert 13 foot 4 inches to 160 inches vs just moving decimals

As a Frenchman living in the US, my favorite Imperial units are the hand (3 hands to a foot) and the poppyseed (4 poppyseeds to a barleycorn, the shoe-size unit; 3 barleycorns to an inch). 10cm and 2mm.

People stop asking me to convert to Imperial pretty quick.