Units

I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out where a "stone" came from. British units seem to combine elegant binary simplicity with random lunacy. It turns out that a stone was even weirder than I thought: not just 14 pounds when talking about people's weight, but 8 pounds for meat (the 6 pound difference from 14 pounds for live weight was assumed to be the butcher's share), 12 pounds for lead, 8 pounds for spices, and 5 pounds for glass. "in practice varied according to local standards" It's easy to think of England as a single country--this is a sharp reminder that it wasn't so for a long time. And, of course, there's no guarantee it will stay a single country forever.

So of course that leads to money and the Charlemagne system that the Brits used until 1971: 240 denarius to a silver pound (1 solidus = 12 denari). Charlemagne's denarius would be about \$1.30 worth of silver--and recalling that the daily income for much of the world has been O(\$2/day), the New Testament denarius = day's wage fits right in. (His silver pound was about 3/4 of our pound.) So what's with the guinea, ringing in at 1 pound and 1 shilling? It looks like that was an artifact of trying to maintain both a silver and a gold standard simultaneously. They started out the same, but the price of gold went up, and after a while they fixed it back down to the current standard of a pound and a shilling. Gold was more high-toned than silver, so even after the coins weren't made anymore prices for high-toned stuff was in guineas.

Lengths are goofy. 3 barleycorns to the inch, 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard {looks like we're doing 3's instead of powers of 2 but it isn't crazy yet}, 16.5 feet to the rod {what??}, 320 rods to the mile {at least it's a round number}, 5280 feet to the mile {who can remember that?}.

16 ounces to the pound {nicely binary}, 14 pounds to a stone {??}, 8 stone to the hundredweight {but it isn't a hundred anything!}, 20 hundredweight in a long ton {2240 pounds}. There's lots of fossil history broken up and and jammed together in that head cheese of a system.