Monday, April 21, 2008
Giant yolk
Have got into the habit of eating breakfast white puddings at the rate of two fifths, two fifths and one fifth. On the grounds that a third is not quite enough - but with the downside that on the third day there is nowhere near enough. So today the last fifth was augmented with an egg which was hatched maybe fifty yards down the road. Not a particularly big egg - I think the chickens involved might be housewife hand reared on organic maize but are not particularly big themselves - but the yolk was enormous. Maybe half as wide again as a regular egg and very yellow. BH thought it was one of those yolks which nature had intended as twins, but which had quite made it to the point of division. Tasted OK, whatever.
As a result of a chance conversation in the Tooting Wetherspoons, am now an expert on English measures of land. One confusion is dispersed when I learn that rods (old English), poles (old English) and perches (French) are all the same as a measure of length at 5.5 yards (a fairly hefty pole if one is carrying it about, perhaps as a spear). There is also a measure of area called a pole, being a square pole or 30.25 square yards. A chain is then 4 poles or 66 feet (moving into proper, numerological or Babylonian numbers and also bringing in the good prime number 11) and 10 chains is one furlong. A furlong is old English for furrow, and a field which is a furlong square or 10 acres in area, was the proper size for a village field under the open field system, with any one villager having a one or more furlongs. A chain can also be expressed as a 100 links and an acre as 100,000 square links. Surveyors using chains would have to be careful as the length of their chain would increase by approximately one fifth of an inch if the temperature rose by 20F. Maybe there was an angle here. Finally, a furlong was conflated with the Roman stadium some time around 900AD, a stadium being one eighth of a Roman mile of 1,000 paces of 1.618 yards each, to give our mile of 1,760 yards. The Welsh, Irish and Scottish miles were somewhat differant. The mil(l)e word for 1,000 appears to appear in both old English and Latin, so maybe is of Aryan orgin. I also learn that one can either express a pace as the distance between one foot and the next or as the distance between successive footfalls of the same foot. I don't think the Romans were giants so I think they must have gone for this second option.
My own two allotments are charged in square metres, with a total of 540 square metres, maybe 20 poles, giving 10 poles as the standard size for an allotment. And now, having spent quite enough time on numbers, time to get to Cheam while they still have some white bread left.
As a result of a chance conversation in the Tooting Wetherspoons, am now an expert on English measures of land. One confusion is dispersed when I learn that rods (old English), poles (old English) and perches (French) are all the same as a measure of length at 5.5 yards (a fairly hefty pole if one is carrying it about, perhaps as a spear). There is also a measure of area called a pole, being a square pole or 30.25 square yards. A chain is then 4 poles or 66 feet (moving into proper, numerological or Babylonian numbers and also bringing in the good prime number 11) and 10 chains is one furlong. A furlong is old English for furrow, and a field which is a furlong square or 10 acres in area, was the proper size for a village field under the open field system, with any one villager having a one or more furlongs. A chain can also be expressed as a 100 links and an acre as 100,000 square links. Surveyors using chains would have to be careful as the length of their chain would increase by approximately one fifth of an inch if the temperature rose by 20F. Maybe there was an angle here. Finally, a furlong was conflated with the Roman stadium some time around 900AD, a stadium being one eighth of a Roman mile of 1,000 paces of 1.618 yards each, to give our mile of 1,760 yards. The Welsh, Irish and Scottish miles were somewhat differant. The mil(l)e word for 1,000 appears to appear in both old English and Latin, so maybe is of Aryan orgin. I also learn that one can either express a pace as the distance between one foot and the next or as the distance between successive footfalls of the same foot. I don't think the Romans were giants so I think they must have gone for this second option.
My own two allotments are charged in square metres, with a total of 540 square metres, maybe 20 poles, giving 10 poles as the standard size for an allotment. And now, having spent quite enough time on numbers, time to get to Cheam while they still have some white bread left.
# posted by Jim @ 2:10 AM 
