Dear Joe, Paul, and All,
I have interspersed some notes:
on 2001-02-22 05.40, Joseph B. Reid at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Paul Fardig wrote in USMA 11155:
>
>> We need to work with NIST to create an alternative to those conversion
>> cards, one that would be SI only and experientially based, eg "one
> meter is
>> about one long step," etc.
>
> That is a bad example. Who can walk a kilometre in 1000 paces? The
> British army pace is 30 inches, or 5 feet for a double pace. That was
> the
> Roman army's pace also. 1000 double paces made the the miglia, or mile.
> Queen Elizabeth I lengthend the mile to 5280 feet to fit the Saxon
> furlong,
> 8 furlongs to the mile.
Defence force personnel are trained to march with 750 millimetre paces at
120 beats per minute. This means that armies march at 90 metres per minute
or 5.4 kilometres per hour. No doubt, experience has taught army officers
that the army can only march at the pace of its slowest (smallest?) soldier.
Curiously, most of us walk faster than an army can march. Most people walk
at about 100 metres per minute. This means that you can go 1 kilometre in 10
minutes. It also means that you walk at about 6 kilometres per hour.
Although your normal walking pace on a good road or footpath is about 100
m/min or 6 km/h you won¹t be able to keep this pace up in rough conditions.
To work out the distance you can walk allow 4 km/h without a pack and reduce
this to 2 km/h if you have a heavy pack.
Without a pack, a fit walker should be able to easily walk 30 km in a day or
about 15 km if you carry a pack that¹s about a quarter of your body mass. If
you¹re walking without a pack in hilly country, experienced bush walkers
suggest that you allow 20 minutes per kilometre plus 10 minutes for each 100
m rise in altitude.
> A better standard for the metre is the metric salute. Stretch out the
> right army fully and place the left hand against the left ear. The
> metre
> is the distance from the right finger tips and the left hand.
One of the curiosities that I have found in investigating measurement
systems is the useful ness of the old Babylonian and Egyptian cubit - the
length from your elbow to the tip of your longest finger.
I measure my cubit by placing my elbow on a table top and use a carpenter's
rule to measure to the tip of my middle finger. For me my cubit measures
about 495 mm, which I round to 500 mm for practical use - if necessary I
allow for the odd 5 mm. My wife's cubit is about 450 mm so she has to allow
for a greater error if she uses this approximation.
A convenient measure for me is to place the tips of my two longest fingers
together with my elbows pointing out to either side. My elbows are then one
metre apart and I can, for example, use them to measure whether a piece of
furniture will fit into a particular space. My wife allows for a space of
100 mm between her fingertips when she wants to estimate a distance of one
metre.
As a complete digression from the topic, I must tell you an associated story
about this technique.
Over dinner I explained the convenience of my two cubits equals one metre
technique for furniture, to an opera singer friend who was about to move
from one home to another. He was delighted with the technique and insisted
that we supply him with a rule to measure his own cubit; there and then at
the dining table.
The following day we were passing a news stand that was adorned with
magazines that featured young women in various degrees of undress. One of
them had strategically placed her two hands to cover a portion of her
generous chest.
'Ooh look,' said my friend, 'there's a lady measuring a metre!'
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia
