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A standard free measure for distance? Sounds dubious.



No. The other way around. Two seconds is the period of a pendulum with a length of two Sumerian cubits.

(One meter is thus two Sumerian cubits, but that's an artifact due to us still using Sumerian time measurements.)

P.S. I don't know why Sumerians used a factor of two. Americans still divide the day into two 12 hour spans, according to Sumerian fashion.

P.P.S. One second is 1/(2*12*60*60) of a solar day. 12 and 60 were "round numbers" in Sumer; they used sexagesimal counting.


Probably because 12 is a much better base than 10. 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6 and still results in whole numbers, which helps a lot when doing rounding and fraccional numbers. The only reason we use base 10 is because is much easier to count with our fingers.


There's also a method of counting where you touch your thumb to the sections of your fingers on the same hand, which naturally lends itself to base 12. This can be extended by keeping track of how many times you've counted to 12 on the other hand, which lends itself to either base 60 or base 144.

Interestingly, the Sumerians did not seem to employ this method, they would count 6 instances of counting to 10.


Because it traverses the distance twice would be my guess. If you show someone a pendulum going through 3 periods and asked a group of people a generic question like “how many times did it move” without clarifying what you meant I would bet maybe half the people would say 6 as long as everyone counted correctly.




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