Well you see, in 1793, 'Merica requested the metric artifacts from France so we could be metric too. France sent over a kilogram, but the shipment was lost at sea. And that was a little sad.
All joking aside, US feet, inches, pounds, and so on have been secretly really metric since 1893.
Fun fact. if you use your knucklebones to count instead of fingers, and you use multiplication instead of addition you can get to 144 counting on your fingers. (i.e. one digit on the second hand is equal to a full hand- 12- on the first.)
yeah. some bullshit about that being why we have 12 hours, and 12 inches in a foot, is totally going into those golden tablets.
(IIRC, we have 12 hours because there was 10 hours of daylight in Egypt, and an hour on either end for twilight. that evolved into the 24 hour system we have today.)
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Apparently, muricans are a lost tribe of Sumerians.
Hold on a sec. I need to write up some golden tablets or something.
mkwt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well you see, in 1793, 'Merica requested the metric artifacts from France so we could be metric too. France sent over a kilogram, but the shipment was lost at sea. And that was a little sad.
All joking aside, US feet, inches, pounds, and so on have been secretly really metric since 1893.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
eh.
Fun fact. if you use your knucklebones to count instead of fingers, and you use multiplication instead of addition you can get to 144 counting on your fingers. (i.e. one digit on the second hand is equal to a full hand- 12- on the first.)
yeah. some bullshit about that being why we have 12 hours, and 12 inches in a foot, is totally going into those golden tablets.
(IIRC, we have 12 hours because there was 10 hours of daylight in Egypt, and an hour on either end for twilight. that evolved into the 24 hour system we have today.)
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
You can count up to 1023 without knuckles if you use a positional representation.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Sumerians also tried to metrify, but the copper weights they bought mysteriously corroded
vonxylofon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Rude.