You are transferred back in time to 1000 B.C

but how exactly would you make a "standard gauge" in the first place?
I was thinking calibrate something to acceleration due to gravity or the rotation of the Earth. Anything that's relatively constant. But how? How did they do it originally?

>How do you obtain standard measurement units from nothing such as millimeter, centimeter, kilogram?
You can't. However, that is no such problem with the US customary system.
The rankine/fahrenheit scale is designed to be reproducible anywhere using brine and/or ice water and/or body temperature. No such idiotic reference points as boiling water. From ice to body has 64 increments, meaning easy division into units. "but what about the thermometer" Grain, berries, iron, coal, brick, pole lathes, and sand exist. Make and calibrate them yourself, idiot.
From the degree, you move onto the BTU. You take a unit of water and raise it a given height. You record it's temperature. You then pour it into another container and measure it's temperature there. Adjust the pour distance until a multiple of 1 degree occurs. Using that you can determine gravity by comparing the distance between the COM's of water. You don't need to care how much water you use because you are actually measuring an intensive property.
Now that you have energy and temperature, and distance defined, you can define mass. You define mass using the density of water. 62.4 lbf / cubic foot. And because you know gravity, and energy, you know distance. You also know that there are 8.35ish pounds in a gallon, 4 quarts to a gallon, two pints to a quart, 2 cups to pint, 128 fl oz to a gallon, 1 oz to 1fl oz of water.
Wow, are all these simple and discrete relationships great, it means you have many different and equivalent ways of confirming and calibrating your measurements.

cont.

Cool, so we have mass, volume, weight, gravity, temperature, and energy. All that remains is time.
If we were lazy, we could hook up a horse to a pulley, paddle, and volume of water, but let's try to be a bit more precise.
If we were equally lazy, we could use solstices and sticks. But let's try to be a bit more precise and/or not need a decade to properly calibrate.
The simple answer is that we use two sticks, and a barrel. Noon is about the same time each day, so we put a hole in a barrel, and measure the amount of water that leaves it in a day. All that needs to be done is to ensure that the barrel is sufficiently large that the water level doesn't change.
From there we can take the capture volume of water and weight it. From there we can calibrate sand glasses and clocks.

Real world > metric.

>There would be no machine tools if some sperg hadn't spent years of his life polishing a bunch of metal plates down to perfect smoothness.
>He doesn't know about the history of manually powered manual machining
All you need is a pole lathe to make a set of nigger gears that can then be used to make a set of proper gears.

You define an arbitary unit of useful length.

Tell the ruler that hired you to make this the measurement standard throughout the area he rules, for ease of communication and development. Proceed to conquer the world and force them to adopt your system.

b-but nobody said I can't use length of my dick.

Well, what about I will get different distance stick?

Just to be sure this is a clever troll post right?

The foot standard was made from the first 12 peoples feet that left church. They'd get them to all put a foot in a line then divide it by 12 to get the average foot length.

easy find the nearest rock quarry and tart melting the rocks into objects like arrow heads, rods, circles etc, sort of like blacksmithing

No. There is no transnational memes in 1000bc, you don't need an international standard. All you need is a logically defined and easily reproducible unit system that has real world utility.
Metric is none of those. Metric 2.0 (logically defined, units defined based on divisions of constants and discrete quanta, no obfuscation, etc) could be done, but metric 2.0 almost guarantees absurd difficulty in reproducibility even with a pre-existing unit system.

This. I would just shitpost to the emperor and fuck roman prostitutes

Ok yeah so that would standardize it, but with inaccuracies
How did we get to an accuracy acceptable to built modern technology?

Is there a way to get a really accurate measuring device using little to no technology? Just by prior knowledge of physics? Could you exploit Pythagorean theorem or something?

A one meter pendulum has a period of one second. It has been exactly 60 seconds when I have counted to 43 in my mind at my normal counting pace. I can work backwards from there to come up with what a meter should be withing about 5%. After that I could use a very large sundial to tell time more accurately.

trigonometry/geometry can give us some constants
maybe even a length constant
Then we calibrate from that

>hey blacksmith, make me some high carbon steel rods about this long, and a file.
>hey carpenter, plane three boards for me, and attach them to each other such that the planed surfaces are facing in towards each other. Make it as true as possible.
>hey carpenter, build me a pole lathe that is really heavy
You then make the rods all the uniform in diameter. You then place the rods on the planed boards and make the face normal. From there, you place the normalized face onto the planed board and file them all to the same length as the standardized measurement. You them harden them.

Are you a fucking nigger or something?

>Is there a way to get a really accurate measuring device using little to no technology?
Yeah, it's called a micrometer and/or vernier calipers. All they require is wood, a small knife and/or chisel, and some distance to standardize upon. You can't get away from making your own unit system unless you adopt US customary. Metric is defined/obtained in such a way that it is basically impossible to reproduce without a pre-existing unit system. Compare that to US customary which is designed to be reproducible basically anywhere with only slight higher than paleonigger levels of development.

Just get a rod, cut it to be the size of your small toe, and call it a centimeter. Work your way up from there, i doubt you’ll need anything smaller than a centimeter.

light interference and kick ass

wow you are......

Absolutely none of what you proposed is easier to do in imperial units than in metric, instead you have a bunch of meme numbers to memorize and silly requirements like a certain brine solution. The only reason it might seem intuitive at all to you is because you memorized these definitions.

Completely false. All you need to do is construct a temporary system of "imperial" units based on whatever stone knives and bearskins gimmicks you can come up with, then use this to develop sufficient technology to measure the meridian circumference of the earth. Then simply divide this by 40,000, and you have a metre. Then scrap all your ugly temporary system of units and reconstruct SI. Then you can do some real science.

For distance and mass, like we do now. Build the standard yardstick and object of mass out of some durable material. You're in a time when the practical limit to accuracy is pretty coarse, so ti should be doable.
Time is the third component, and that's trickier. The easiest and most accurate would be a pendulum clock, and that wouldn't be easy for me to build. I'd have to hire artisans of the time. But having knowledge of a pendulum as a time keeper would be earth-shattering for the time.

Use cubits based on my powerful employer and using a decimal system and try to derive other units with it.

Also, I would try to find out who the fuck the sea people were...

>silly requirements like a certain brine solution.
No, all you need is for the increments between the points to be easily divisible into discrete values. You can use: Brine and ice water, ice water and body temp, brine and body temp. If you're willing to fudge it and make calibration harder, then you can use any two of the following: brine, ice water, body temp, standard boiling water.
You could redesign the scale to be easily reproducible with any 2 points, but then you end up with fuckhuge numbers.

>instead you have a bunch of meme numbers to memorize
Yes. But my meme numbers have extra utility compared to your meme numbers.

>silly requirements like a certain brine solution.
Ah yes, because we all know that 0.01 thou levels of precision and the the czochralski method are viable with no existing industry.
Do you have a sodium lamp and the meme number for sodium's wavelength memorized?
Do you have a photon detector, a laser/led, a processor with a stable clock rate, the means by which to record the data with sufficient detail, and the positional accuracy for the measurements to be meaningful?
What about a quartz crystal tuning fork, do you have the meme number it resonates at memorized along with a detector sensitive enough to determine the frequency?
Do you have a dour of helium and the equipment necessary to accurately measure the temperature?
Do you have a vacuum pump, pressure vessel with view port, refridgerant, and thermocouples to be able to determine the triple point of water?
Have any cessium-133 lying around?

No? That's weird.

Metric is shit. It requires a pre-existing unit system to be in use first before it is recreated.
US customary can easily be reproduced by anyone, with almost any level of technology. (fire is a requirement to be able to make the thermometers if you don't want to go digging in the desert for it)

Body temperature is very variable.

Yes. But even assuming a blatant feverous variance of 2 degrees you're looking at an error of like 2%, a healthy person brings the potential error down to around 0.5% at most. And you only need to use body temp if you don't have access to salt to make brine.

user, you're talking about metric before the french completely ruined it.
The metric system hasn't had semi-reasonable/semi-reproducible definitions like that for over 200 years.

Imagine being this retarded.

>but how exactly would you make a "standard gauge" in the first place?
Go to the woods, find an oblong rock.
Return to the city, declare the rock's length a standard unit.
Done.

>nobody said I can't use length of my dick.
Too variable.
Your standards committee would have to set a standard for how erect it was, perhaps based on what kind of porn turns you on the most.

"I wrote the plans based on your dick while you watch two girls 69-ing, but the engineers built it using your dick while you watch black-on-white anal."

Who's foot is an actual foot long?

>Is there any way?
You can get pretty close to a millimeter, centimeter, and kilogram pretty easily. Metric units of measurement are all based on water. The real question is why you don't just pick up a rock and declare it as the official 1 unit and then just use it.

Actually, the real question is why someone from a time with public knowledge on how to make pipe guns doesn't just declare himself the ruler in ancient greece by building one.

The sun isn't directly overhead at noon.

It can be, if you're in the tropics.
But that's not a requirement.
North of the tropic of cancer, local noon is when the shadows point due north.
It's also the shortest shadow of the day.
If you can't master a sundial, you aren't going to be bringing any better technology to the ancient world.

>How do you obtain standard measurement units from nothing such as millimeter, centimeter, kilogram?

Oh look, another child that thinks SI is super special and science™.

2/10

Brainlet.

Shitposting aside, Euro dates really are retarded.
Arabic numbers go from the general to the specific
YYYY-MM-DD is the only logical choice for dates.
Leave the year off, and you have the American style MM-DD,

And Fahrenheit is far more sensible than Celsius for everyday, real-world use.
Why would I want a temperature range based on boiling and freezing?
I can't set my stove to freezing, nor can I set my fridge to boiling.
I'll never use those tow temps in the same context.
Wouldn't it be better if we used a system where outdoor temperatures ranged from 0 to 100?
What if the coldest it usually gets were zero, and the hottest it usually gets is 100?
Oh wait, that's Fahrenheit.

*those two temps

Modern SI units are standardized to some fairly sophisticated shit like Caesium ion vibrations or whatever for time and the specific length of a specific piece of alloy at a specific temperature etc.
I'm curious as to whether you can make accurate measuring tools that are standardized to something (close to) constant back in 1000 BC like we do today. So like a rock or your arm wouldn't be good enough.

Some are, some aren't.

Mass for instance?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#International_prototype_kilogram
tl;dr: The standard for what's a kilogram is actually based on a specific lump of metal stored in a basement somewhere in the suburbs of Paris.
Oh, and it changes over time:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram#Stability_of_the_international_prototype_kilogram

We might as well base the kilogram on the mass of the king's dick.

is there not a way to standardize to physical constants like the speed of light or a Planck length (whatever that is)?
this may be the key becoming a type 1 civilization

>but the engineers built it using your dick while you watch black-on-white anal
So two inches?

1 time unit = one 86400th of a day (what Babylonians came up with was good enough)
1 distance unit = one 340th of the distance sound travels in one time unit at sea level
1 mass unit = the mass of a 1000th of one cubic distance unit of cater at the temperature at which it is the densest
1 temperature unit = linear scale with 0 being water's triple point and 100 being its boiling point at sea level
1 intensity unit = useless for the time
1 matter quantity unit = useless for the time
1 light intensity unit = useless, period

Just ask a few friendly Greeks to hold your weird glass magic wand in their mouth and take an average.

Choose a standard for length then stick with it. Later you can more precisely determine it. Use this to define a volume of frozen water, and from this derive the mass of frozen water. Further along the line you can build a watt balance to determine the kilogram pretty goddamn precisely. For construction of machines you do noy need to reproduce the metric system

>is there not a way to standardize to physical constants like the speed of light
The meter is based on the speed of light.
There are efforts underway to get a more exact idea of how much each atom weighs, so we can redefine he kilogram in terms of so many atoms of cobalt (or whatever).

>this may be the key becoming a type 1 civilization
No.
Practical engineering doesn't require any measuring system to be exact. There are always allowable tolerances, that's just the nature of machining and tool making in general.
Secondly, I really have a hard time with the Kardashev scale.
The idea is that more "advanced" civilizations use more energy.
Which means you're lauding larger populations and/or less efficient use of energy.
And both of those sound like less advanced civilizations to me, not more advanced.

>So two inches?
Depends.
Is the catcher a boy or a girl?

>>YYYY-MM-DD is the only logical choice for dates.
Indeed it is the only logical choice which is why one wonders why the US doesnt use it and opt for the MM-DD-YYYY standard like a bunch of retards. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_the_United_States

>one 86400th of a day (what Babylonians came up with was good enough)
The days are getting longer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

>water at the temperature at which it is the densest
That's about 3 deg Celsius, and would require a fair amount of testing to verify.
>water's triple point and 100 being its boiling point at sea level
Both these vary with air pressure, so you need to settle on exactly what's standard for air pressure.
OK, maybe not for what technology you'll implement with modern Veeky Forumsentific knowledge and tools available at the time,
but in the long run, using water for anything makes the system inherently vague.

Why pick on Murrica? Euro dates are just as bad (or worse for DD--MM vs MM-DD).
The good news is YYYY-MM-DD is gaining ground on both continents.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

>1000 BC
>getting a swimming turd about leap seconds

>the meter is based on the speed of light
*metre
and no it is not

You dont "obtain". You make.

You do realize that the guy i responded to says that there is only one correct standard and then says that the US uses it when they dont, right?

Make your subordinates use them using a scale

a kilogram and a liter was defined as a bucket of water from the seine river

>*metre
Google auto-corrects "metre" to "meter", (although Wikipedia likes the retarded British spelling better).
And yes, the meter IS based on the speed of light.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Speed_of_light_definition
> the 17th CGPM in 1983 replaced the definition of the metre with its current definition, thus fixing the length of the metre in terms of the second and the speed of light:[1]

1983 fer fucks sake, try to keep up.

>You do realize that the guy i responded to says that there is only one correct standard
I thought you were responding to me, but I never said there was only one correct standard.
Let's review:
>Euro dates really are retarded.
(should not be misconstrued as "Murrican dates are not retarded").
>YYYY-MM-DD is the only logical choice for dates.
I am saying only one date format is "logical" (not "correct").

>Leave the year off, and you have the American style MM-DD,
For short (non-year) dates the US system goes from the general to the specific, just like Arabic numerals, while euro-dates do not.
Without the year, American dates are more similar to ISO8601 than Euro dates.

Well, hate to break it to you OP, but 1100-700 B.C was a Dark Age in Ancient Greece following the end of the Bronze Age. There wouldn't have been anyone wealthy enough to pay you as this period was marked by a reduction in literacy, a dissolution of the top 2 ruling classes, and a decentralization of the population. Basically everyone returns to subsistence farming.

If you go back a bit further to 1600-1100, we can hit the Late Bronze Age and the palace era, and you can build.. well palaces. Not much else was built during this time that's been recovered. There are some impressive grave sites at those such as at Platae, but not much else.

Now if you wait a bit we can transition to the Archaic Era from 700-508, but no one is too rich then. If you really want some cash monay, wait until around 454 in the Classical Era when the Athenian (formally Delian) League comes to fruition and Athens is forcibly raking in ~600 million USD (600 Talents)/year. Then someone can most definitely do as you say. In fact, multiple nobility in Athens could afford it at this point.

To answer your question, they would have just used comparison. How is that insane? One gets a string, "yep that's about as long as we need." Weight? Who gives a fuck. They're just using rocks with the same density anyway. Have a dude chisel that bitch up and get some more dudes (probably slaves or metics) to put it together. What kind of technological marvels do you think were made by the Greeks?

I stand corrected
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realisation_(metrology)
I didn't even know metrology was a field

>p
You're right in that OP is ignorant of the finer points of ancient history, but just think what impact a steam tractor would have, even in a time period when "everyone returns to subsistence farming".

Oh I have no doubt that constructing modern marvels (from our era) in an ancient period would have tremendous impacts on an ancient civilization. I didn't think that was the question though. Was he talking about constructing things that were regularly constructed or things that would have been unknown?

If the latter, the only thing you could rely on is your own understanding of the schematics pretransportation. Otherwise .. make up your own units using some constant and do algebra. Once you have a length that's area, volume. Assuming you're always working with a constant density, that's mass. Very little actual measurements are needs for rudimentary machines. A steam powered anything could be done by trial and error without measuring temperature. You're getting paid by some nobility to craft wizardry that has previously never existed. You got all the time in the world.

>Was he talking about constructing things that were regularly constructed or things that would have been unknown?
Well, he said:
>to build technological marvels of the time.
Which is pretty vague, but unless we're talking architecture, or Hero's engine, I'm drawing a blank on "technological marvels" local to 1000 BC, so I'll assume he means modern (19th century?) technology.
I'm thinking steam engines, Edison-level electric lighting, etc.

...and modern firearms.

Most of EU uses DD-MM-YYYY which is infact what most of the world uses and its not much different from YYYY-MM-DD however the only country in the world that somehow manages to use an illogical pattern is the US with MM-DD-YYYY.

The month is the quickest and easiest piece of information for finding how relevant information is. Whether a piece of information is from the same year provides very little information as to its relevance. The day provides next to no information wrt relevance unless it is in the same/prior month, and the same year.

US conventions are designed for the real world.

>modern technology
Nigger, you can't just make the jump between 1000 BC and now, you have to take steps
Tbh I would just show their intelligentsia caste the basics, explained concepts and then let them develop working models while jumping between projects. I'd do my best to accelerate humanity's development as much as possible - that is, bringing their mathematical knowledge at least up to differential and integral calculus and its applications, the basics of chemistry (I'm not a chemist but I can try), the concept of steam machines, electricity and its applications, gunpowder... I could also show them Newtonian mechanics and gravity, which in conjunction with calculus could be used to show the Earth orbits the sun. I would melt glass, polish it into lenses and then show them the basics of optics. Anway:
I do not know any reasonable standard units in nature, so I'd probably just measure the King's hall or something and make a reference stick. They don't need more precise units for now; we can develop precise units when we need them. The only important thing would be making them compatible with their number base (like metric and not like Imperial).

>Oh I have no doubt that constructing modern marvels (from our era) in an ancient period would have tremendous impacts on an ancient civilization.
And yet there are still billions of sub-humans that are no different than paleoniggers of the past.

>Was he talking about constructing things that were regularly constructed or things that would have been unknown?
When I read the prompt, I believe the answer is both.

>A steam powered anything could be done by trial and error without measuring temperature.
That's how you don't pay entropic tax and/or make a bomb.

>make up your own units using some constant and do algebra.
see: How do you propose to fumlinate mercury without a unit system? Yeah it's possible, but your yields would be comparable to using a bicycle to try to centrifuge hex.

>you can't just make the jump between 1000 BC and now, you have to take steps
Give me ten whites and non-chinese asians, and I can turn sub-saharan african into rhodesia within a century.

>The only important thing would be making them compatible with their number base (like metric and not like Imperial).
Congrats, you just stagnated humanity.

>not much different from YYYY-MM-DD
It's completely scrambled.

The most significant digit is the thousands place in the year, the least significant digit is the ones place on the day.
Lets rank the digits from most significant (1) to the least significant:
ISO 8601:
YYYY-MM-DD
1234-56-78
neat, huh?

Euro:
DD-MM-YYYY
78-56-1234
wtf???

American:
MM-DD-YYYY
56-78-1234
only a little better.

Now lets look at dates without the year:
Euro:
DD-MM
34-12
still wtf

American:
MM-DD
12-34
that's better!

Besides, do you honestly say dates in DD-MM order?
"My birthday is 25th October".
"Tomorrow is the 4th of February".

>How do you propose to fumlinate mercury without a unit system?
When did I say anything about not creating a measuring system???

>>The only important thing would be making them compatible with their number base (like metric and not like Imperial).
>Congrats, you just stagnated humanity.
This thread is full of people so in love with the metric system that nothing else will do.

Meanwhile we still use the Babylonian system of 1/60th's and 1/360ths because these numbers have so many prime factors.
But hey, maybe nothing should ever be divisible by three.

I thought you were proposing a relative unit system that only contained length and weight relative to rocks.

(You)
>And yet there are still billions of sub-humans that are no different than paleoniggers of the past.

Your point is? The doesn't negate the fact that a new idea still contributes SOMETHING. I don't at all agree with OPs premise. It makes the assumption that any new technology developed wasn't somehow dependent on 2 thousand years of engineering developments. Consider the actual material and engineering specifications necessary to create a functioning steam engine--beyond the basic principles such as entropy cost.

>When I read the prompt, I believe the answer is both.

I think he doesn't know what he means. Which I return to my point about ignoring the role of engineering.

>That's how you don't pay entropic tax and/or make a bomb.

I.e. exactly how inventing shit tends to work out. No one said it was safe to try and skip 3000 years of engineering.

>>make up your own units using some constant and do algebra.
>see:

These processes are just more specific examples of exactly what I was saying. Thanks for spelling it out.

TL;DR: I don't think we disagree user. I think we're both saying that OPs question attempts to vastly oversimplify the situation from multiple perspectives. I think the question is only reasonable in the context that one is asking how to do this if they were creating feats that were already contemporary to that time period. But that's a rather boring question I suppose. Interesting from a historical perspective though.

>I thought you were proposing a relative unit system that only contained length and weight relative to rocks.
Sure, why not?
The meter, liter, and gram are arbitrary measurements, and the only important part is that you can get reproducible results.
I'm assuming you're going to have to re-invent all the reference works, so what does it matter if you're using a new system?

>Sure, why not?
because it is hard to do chemisty that requires pressurization and temperature gradients when you try to calibrate a gauge in terms of the weight of a volume of rock, and the distance that water must be poured to melt said rock.

You are confused.

Is one person (me).
The person who talked about how one could devise any system of measuring using something that's relevant to process. For constructing stone things -> stone measurments.

The person your talking to now is (I think)
I think anyway. Regardless I do agree with their point here. It only needs to be reproducible. Also I'm still working under the assumption that we're not talking about things like gunpowder because that's a lot of chemistry which I don't think any one person has enough time in a lifetime to single handedly develop the entirety of. See my point about the reasonableness of this question and engineering requirments/developments in

Where do you think our current systems come from?
The meter was literally based on the largest rock we had handy (the Earth).

>calibrate a gauge in terms of the weight of a volume of rock,
As compared to the weight of a volume of water?

>Where do you think our current systems come from?
Water and the pound mass of the earth.

>As compared to the weight of a volume of water?
See:

>The person your talking to now is (I think)
Correct. I see a (You) on each link.

Also me:
And yeah, "modern" firearms might be a little ambitious, but I'm pretty sure most chem majors could produce a black-powder rocket, or possibly a blunderbuss-level firearm.

I'm not a chemist, but if memory serves, black powder is charcoal, sulfur and salt peter.
I know how to make charcoal, and know sulfur is mined, but I'm not sure how to even recognize it, beyond looking for "stinky dirt".
I really don't remember much about salt peter, except there's some way to get it from urine?
And I'm just a code monkey.

Ok, full disclosure: I just Googled it and, no I couldn't have made salt peter from memory.

Sun dial

>but I'm pretty sure most chem majors could produce a black-powder rocket, or possibly a blunderbuss-level firearm.
Naw, skip over bp. Move straight onto cordite. All you need is acetone, straw, and piss. Sulfates are too hard to gather.

>I'm not a chemist, but if memory serves, black powder is charcoal, sulfur and salt peter.
That is indeed the meme nigger bp, but it isn't real bp.

>I really don't remember much about salt peter, except there's some way to get it from urine?
Move straight to ammonium nitrate, you can synthesize it and it produces a better result.

t. chemical

Luckily for me, my one bone segment in my pinky finger is exactly 1cm long.
So I start my standard there.
Wooden meter sticks shall cross the land
100cm = 1m
1m3 of H2O = 1 metric ton
Etcetera

I shall teach the heathens how to create & use electricity,make gunpowder, and slow burn fuses too.

>Luckily for me, my one bone segment in my pinky finger is exactly 1cm long.

And like always, Canadians in business / industry / government have to learn all three to make sense of anything being traded or transported.
Same with Liters, Imperial Gallons, and SAE (Murica) Gallons.. fun times.

>Well, hate to break it to you OP, but 1100-700 B.C was a Dark Age in Ancient Greece following the end of the Bronze Age. There wouldn't have been anyone wealthy enough to pay you as this period was marked by a reduction in literacy, a dissolution of the top 2 ruling classes, and a decentralization of the population. Basically everyone returns to subsistence farming.
Not OP, I'm , but that's perfect timing as I can become the new "ruling class" for my area then.

Kek, I do have small hands for my body size, I will admit. But with small hands comes finesse in tight spaces, which is a god send when it comes to modern vehicles drive train compartments.