timbl: Pre-rdf
timbl: "The surveyors rod, also known as a pole or a perch, is a particularly important piece of material culture. Essentially a long wooden staff of 16 1/2 English feet, this standardized length allowed early surveyors to measure distances accurately. "
DanC: concurs with wikipedia on statute mile
DanC: fun... "Indeed, such puzzles are nice illustrations of what I half-jokingly call the fractal texture of history."
timbl: It seems that the origin of the factor of 11 is not the yard-chain-furlong-mile relationahip, but an earliuer factor of 16.5 which was a de facto standard.
DanC: the sources of the tzinfo timezone database are chock-full of similar stories
timbl: "Gunter [...] had made a brilliant synthesis of two otherwise incompatible systems, the traditional English land measurements, based on the number 4, and the newly introduced system of decimals based on the number 10."
timbl: "W3C blue helmets work" goes back a long way.
DanC: concurs with wikipedia on statute mile
DanC: fun... "Indeed, such puzzles are nice illustrations of what I half-jokingly call the fractal texture of history."
timbl: It seems that the origin of the factor of 11 is not the yard-chain-furlong-mile relationahip, but an earliuer factor of 16.5 which was a de facto standard.
DanC: the sources of the tzinfo timezone database are chock-full of similar stories
timbl: "Gunter [...] had made a brilliant synthesis of two otherwise incompatible systems, the traditional English land measurements, based on the number 4, and the newly introduced system of decimals based on the number 10."
timbl: "W3C blue helmets work" goes back a long way.