The Measure of Man

When Stephanie posted yesterday that she intended to walk 7 kilometers to the nearest store for beer and toilet paper, and then (inevitably) 7 kilometers back to her hermitage, the thought did cross my mind, "7 kilometers? that's... um... about 4 miles. She must be in way better shape than I am." And she undoubtedly is, but after reading her post today, I felt a bit less inferior. I also felt like knowing exactly how far 7 kilometers is, anyway (I know that if you're a scientist and/or living outside the US, you are thinking, "it's 7 kilometers, dummy" — sorry, but I still think in miles: deal with it), and I consulted this handy conversion tool. A kilometer is approximately .621 statute mile, or just about 5/8 mile, and 7 kilometers is about 4.35 miles, or 1 megaparsec, depending on whether you're sitting at your computer playing with length conversions or walking down a frozen road in the middle of nowhere.

Since I, as a sensible way-out-of-shape person, was engaged in the former activity, I noticed that this conversion tool had a ton of different measurements to choose from. In addition to your basic statute mile, for example, you can convert to or from the ancient British mile (.9997 statute mile), Irish mile (1.273), international nautical mile (1.15), ancient Roman mile (.944), and so on. At that point I began to wonder about the smoot, and, sure enough, it's in the list.

If you live in the Boston area, especially if you work with engineers, I probably don't have to tell you what a smoot is. For the benefit of the rest of the world, in October 1958 an MIT freshman named Oliver Smoot was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the Mass. Ave. Bridge spanning the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston. The smoot marks, repainted each year by MIT students, have become enshrined in local lore and in the hearts of the Cambridge police, who use them to specify the location of accidents.

More fun smoot facts:

• The official length of a smoot is 5 feet, 7 inches. (That's US/international feet and inches. It turns out that there are various flavors of feet as well as miles.)
  
• I once worked on a project whose British-American chief engineer was so taken with the smoot that he made the software use it as the standard internal measurement to and from which all more commonplace measurements such as centimeters and inches were converted.
  
• The Robert B. Parker novel Early Autumn sets a confrontation on the bridge, so that Spenser, the first-person protagonist, can briefly explain the smoot and then say, a few paragraphs later, "There was another gunshot from five smoots away."
  
• Oliver Smoot is a former Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

That last fact, which I got from this Wikipedia article, makes me giggle. Should you for some reason be not yet sated with smootiana, read the article.

Spring watch: still nothing.


But I live in hope.