Giles Brindley believed that the design of the bassoon was illogical. So, in 1967 he created a "logical bassoon." The footage below aired on the British show Tomorrow's World in 1969.
A great deal of effort has gone into trying to come up with standard clothing sizes for women. Organizations such as the National Bureau of Standards have, over the years, measured tens thousands of women.
However, precise standards have proved elusive. Instead, according to Wikipedia, clothes makers "follow the more loosely defined standards known as U.S. catalog sizes." And catalog sizes "may vary even among different styles of the same type of garment."
I haven't found any use of Merrie Metric outside of the Patent and Trademark Gazette, but I'm curious what kind of uses her creators imagined for her. Were they going to sell metric rulers and tape measures with her picture on them?
In Finland, the indigenous Sami people have a very special unit of measurement. It's called a poronkusema, which is defined as the distance a reindeer can travel before it needs to stop and urinate. The Sami, who have lived alongside reindeer for centuries, attentively noted that the animals won't walk and relieve themselves at the same time. And so, once approximately every 7.5 kilometres, a poronkusema, they stop and empty their bladders. While this measurement may seem a touch absurd to non-reindeer herders, it should be said that before the metric system came along, many countries and cultures had their own rather peculiar systems. It's likely that people of the future will find it just as weird that we described the unfathomable loss of our rainforests in terms of "football fields."
I found a Finnish-language book titled Poronkusema, but the google-translated blurb is somewhat incomprehensible and doesn't mention anything about urinating reindeers.
Poronkusema is a humane, unadorned and dramatic story about acceptance, forgiveness, equality and growing up. Poronkusema is a series of events with a flavor of the life of the main character and his close circle, not too salty smoothed, where treatment and head and tail are missing. Mother's forgiveness and acceptance of loved ones as they are. How can the death of a child change and shape the future of family members and close friends. This is the countdown for this story. You'll jump like a fly on a moldy ceiling and juice up juicy coincidences like peeking into locker rooms in elementary school. We were kind of the usual The Usual Suspects, like from that classic Yankee movie directed by Bryan Singer. The only difference. We weren't that good looking.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.