On Measuring "Stuff"
Once upon a time, an anglophonic Robert Byrd arrived in Antarctica. He tried to speak with the penguins.
But penguins were ignorant. They had no sense of numbers. Nor the idea of a standardized, uniform unit of measurement.
So Robert Byrd sent for an official named BootLicker Buxley, who invented a unit of measurement called "the foot". The length of "the foot" was the distance from the King's tiptoes to his back heel.
But "the foot" was sort of a ridiculous unit of measurement for long distances. For example, traveling from the Antarctic penisula to the geographic south pole is approximately 9,266,400 feet. That is a lot of feet.
So they created "the mile". There were a number of different definitions, but Queen Elizabeth I of English settled it in the 17th century. [This is the 21st century, by the way.]
So this was all dandy. But then suddenly a bunch of maniacs wanted to eat the aristocracy and monarchy, overthrow colonial leadership, and other similar acts of egalitarian madness.
So suddenly, there was a new measurement for the distance (or length) between two points on a straight line. But what about other units of measurements?