Chebucto Regional Softball Club

@sophieschmieg @mhoye @futurebird It's an artifact of when some silly English git decided that the mile, which the Romans pegged at a sort-of-sensible "thousand paces" at 5 feet per "pace", needed to be an exact integer number of furlongs.

What is a fscking furlong? An originally not-too-terrible agricultural unit, representing a more-or-less typical length of plowed field. Unfortunately, the official "furlong" was 220 yards or 660 feet, which is not only why there is a cursed factor of 11 in things, it's why the English (and hence US) mile is 5280 feet (=8x660) instead of 5000.

It gets worse, and I'm not going to go into it here (the attached Wikipedia article covers it better), but the furlong itself was once more "even" (600 feet), and it *also* got contorted into something more awkward because of an underlying unit re-definition.

Furlong - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

@sophieschmieg @mhoye @futurebird There was clearly a good reason to have 12 points be a length unit unto itself, much like 12 inches is 1 foot. But back in the day, there was a schism between the people who wanted to call the 12-point unit a "barle" (the normies) or an "ycorn" (the weirdos who -- not entirely unreasonably -- thought "yttrium" was the coolest thing to name an element, ever). As a result (and also because nobody could agree on a pronunciation for either one), no special name for this otherwise useful length entered the lexicon.

(/s, in case it's not clear)

@futurebird @Paperposts

1 ant-foot = … I guess maybe 1/3 point* = 1/216 inch = 1/2192 person-foot

Don’t ask me to sort out ant-cubits or ant-miles.

* More dependent on the choice of ant than people-feet are on the choice of person, of course.

@Paperposts @futurebird

USAnians and some (mostly older) UKians: that unholy mess covering 90% of the chart

Everyone else: that nice clean single vertical line with a bunch of evenly spaced units ending in “m”