Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

At least when they fly 33000 feet I can pretend that aviation doesn't still use a unit of measurement based on a king saying "you know what they say about a guy with big feet"

Regular reminder that the meter is a bullshit arbitrary unit that can't actually be derived from anything else. Even the original (flawed) definition of 1/10,000,000 of the circumference of the Earth isn't something a normal person could measure. Should have been based on gravity

Love your tweets but 1) was based on "which they defined as equal to one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator" (i.e. not circumference of earth) and 2) is currently defined using the speed of light (which was of course based on the first def.)

Yup, was mistaken on that. And yeah it's currently based on the speed of light but that is 1) Impossible for a normal human to measure 2) Defined as an arbitrary fraction meant to keep the definition as the same as when it was a stick in Paris

Yes, kind of crazy - but gravity varies slightly across the earth so can't use that reliably either (learnt this 1 minute ago on wikipedia )