More Numbers and Measures

Making measurements and measuring things is something we have done since the beginning. For example, it has been written that the world was created in seven days, the traditional unit of time marked by one rotation of the Earth on its axis. Of course, I will readily acknowledge that there is some disagreement on what this really means, since it says in another place that a day is like a thousand years, or vice versa.

To be more specific, and that’s what measuring is all about, the actual length of a day is 23 hours 56 minutes and four seconds. Over a period of four years these increments are assembled to create the leap year adjustment known as February 29th. (To be absolutely precise there are also occasional leap seconds added periodically to keep things tidy. I’d bet you didn’t know that.)

It is quite amazing how many kinds of measures there are. We have measures of time, such as weeks, hours, minutes, and years. We have measures of mass, such as grams, pounds and tons. We have measures of sound volume, of energy, of radioactivity, of pressure, of type font sizes, of land mass, and of speed.

A byte is a unit of information equal to eight bits in computer engineering. A bolt is a measurement of finished cloth. A board foot is a unit of volume for measuring lumber. (Bored feet is what you get when you’re not dancing.) A breve is a standard unit of relative time in music, equivalent to the length of two whole notes. Bushels are measurement units for dry commodities such as grains or fruits. In 1303 King Edward I defined a bushel as 8 gallons.

In fact, King Edward I made a lot of weights “law” in his day including the ounce, pound, wey, stone, and hundredweight. three decades later, all these units of weight were called avoirdupois, a French word meaning "goods of weight", intended mainly for use in trade. One bit of little known trivia derived from this is that a pound of feathers is actually heavier than a pound of gold. Why? Because gold is measured in troy ounces and feathers in the traditional avoirdupois.

Here’s another common measure where government intervened and changed things. The word "mile" comes from the Roman milia, "thousands." The Romans measured distances in paces, which were about five feet. So, milia passum, 1,000 paces or about 5,000 feet, was the length of a mile. The length of a mile used to be 5,000 feet. However, in 1575 the British Parliament added 280 feet to this measurement, declaring the mile to be 1,760 yards or 5,280 feet, so that it could be divided evenly into furlongs. One furlong is 660 feet long, giving 8 furlongs to the mile.

Automotive Related Measurements

Horsepower, as you might guess, is the amount of power exerted by one horse pulling. After many careful measurements James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, determined that a horse can lift 550 pounds at a rate of one foot per second, which translates into 745.7 watts. Some clever American engineers decided that manpower should have a measurement as well, equivalent to 0.1 horsepower or 74.57 watts.

MPG is the familiar acronym for miles per gallon, which measures the rate of fuel consumption in a motor vehicle. One mile per gallon equals approximately 0.4252 kilometers per liter. In most other countries the measure is actually liters per hundred kilometers.

MPH is our common measure of speed. One mile per hour equals 22/15ths feet per second or 1.609 kilometers per hour or 0.447 meters per second. I can tell why Americans balked at the idea of going metric. Wed have a hard time figuring out how fast were going.

RPM means revolutions per minute, a unit of frequency as a measure of rotation rates in mechanics. In cars RPM is measured by a tachometer. Some motorists pay attention to RPM so they don't over rev and cause component failure. Race car drivers try to keep RPM rates in a range that will provide maximum power.

Oil Measures

The quart is a unit of volume, so named because it represents one quarter of a gallon. When measuring liquid, one quart is 32 fluid ounces, or 57.75 cubic inches. On the other hand, when measuring dry goods like pecans or blueberries, a quart is 67.201 cubic inches. Go figure.

Drums are sometimes used for measuring oil, containing 55 U.S. gallons or about 208.198 liters. Drums are not the same as barrels, the standard unit of volume for measuring petroleum. One drum is equivalent to 1.3095 barrels. A barrel is equivalent to 42 U.S. gallons, which is coincidentally the same size as a traditional wine barrel, more commonly called a tierce. Strangely enough, a barrel of beer is only 31 gallons and the guy who shows up with it is usually the life of the party.

Measuring Success

And finally, we have measures of success. It is not enough to just measure everything. What’s important is measuring the right things. In baseball, what determines a game’s outcomes is runs, not the number of swings. Batters measure their hitting percentage because it has a bearing on the games outcome. Scorekeepers don’t really care how many times you swing the bat, but rather how often you hit the ball and safely reach a base.

For this reason the measure of success in life cannot be, “He who has the most toys wins.” As we know all too well, a lot of scoundrels have done great damage to our economy through theft, deceit, and other machinations. Many who ought to be in jail are going to have nice retirement villas in the Bahamas. And O.J., whose true colors have once more made the national press as his latest trial went to court, might be a “winner” by the sole measure of his lifestyle these past thirty years, but in truth, we know otherwise.

Character and integrity count in the success equation. Compassion would also have to be part of that mix, a component of how we treat others. What are things you evaluate when measuring success?