this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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How long is that thing?
A foot.
How long is that?
About as long as a foot.
Oh cool, I have two of those to compare right here. Thanks for telling me how long stuff is in an easy to understand way.
What about that thing?
30 centimeters.
How long is a centimeter?
A hundredth as long as a meter.
How long is a meter?
As long as the distance light can travel in a vacuum in 1/299752458 of a second.
Please throw yourself off a bridge for using bizarre measurements developed by frenchmen.
Actually that's a modern measurement concept based on the original meter. By using this concept, the size of a meter is tied to absolute terms in physics that "anyone" could measure with the right tools, while the original concept was based on a physical object called the meter, which is subject to many things such as heat dilation for example making it not accurate, and if the original object was lost we would not have a way to tell what is a meter (conceptually speaking of course).
The foot on the other hand (lol) is traditionally based on the king's foot size. This of course depends on which country (or realm?), and to make matters worst, who's the king at the time, because yes the official measure would change based on that too.
Of course that's not how it is today, but we can say the original foot was lost long ago.
Ditto for the original meter. We sure are lucky that an approximation of the measurement is built into the name of the foot. It’s frighteningly European to have a measurement name that roughly translates to “measure”
Hey, how many measures is that?
honestly curious, as someone that doesn't intuitively know how long a foot (in terms of measure) is, does it actually compare to the average size of the average foot? Like if you say something is 2 feet long, can you actually walk 2 steps and that's a pretty good approximation?
Its a tad low if you’re barefoot, frighteningly close when you have shoes on. For men’s average shoe sizes.
It’s a man’s man’s man’s foots world.