English units of measure

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" wrote in
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/27406 :

> Here's a link on the history of English units of measurement that
> may be of interest to some of you:
> 
> http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html

Thanks, I've bookmarked it. It would have come in handy yesterday when
the GM asked the weight of a bushel of grain (the worldbook gave how
much grain to feed a family for a year in bushels but the cargo
capacity of a knorr in tons).

It also includes a nice clear definition of 'chain':
a unit of distance formerly used by surveyors. The traditional British
surveyor's chain, also called Gunter's chain  because it was
introduced by the English mathematician Edmund Gunter (1581-1626) in
1620, is 4 rods  long: that's equal to exactly 1/80 mile, 1/10
furlong, 22 yards, or 66 feet (20.1168 meters). The traditional length
of a cricket pitch is 1 chain. Gunter's chain has the useful property
that an acre is exactly 10 square chains. The chain was divided into
100 links. American surveyors sometimes used a longer chain of 100
feet, known as the engineer's chain or Ramsden's chain. (However,
Gunter's chain is also used in the U.S.; in fact, it is an important
unit in the Public Lands Survey System.) In Texas, the vara chain of 2
varas (55.556 ft) was used in surveying Spanish land grants. In the
metric world, surveyors often use a chain of 20 meters (65.617 ft).

In a very early phase of the project that has been ruining all our
lives for several years now, I was supposed to design a database to
store the information then residing on the maps and in the heads of
the Maintenance of Way (now renamed Wayside Systems) department. The
locations on their maps were stated in 'chaining' which is x + y where
x is the number of chains and y is the remainder in feet. Manfred (my
user contact) said he thought a chain is 100 yards but he wasn't sure.
So I looked up 'chain' in a lot of dictionaries and eventually learned
that a chain is a unit of 66 feet, 100 feet, or 20 meters.

When I found out that the chains on our maps were 100 feet, I fumed
that they could have written 344,031.288 instead of 344 + 31.288.

I don't understand why no one I've ever met shares my passion at such
variable units of measurement. You Can Have 17 Sickles to the Galleon
and 29 Knuts to the Sickle and I'll pull out my calculator to find how
many Knuts in half a Galleon, but at least the number of Knuts to a
Sickle doesn't Vary From Shop To Shop!