this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Think "you wake up in the woods naked," Dr. Stone-style tech reset. How could humans acquire a 1-gram weight, a centimeter ruler, an HH:MM:SS timekeeping device, etc. starting with natural resources?

My best guess was something involving calibrating a mercury thermometer (after spending years developing glassblowing and finding mercury, lol) using boiling water at sea level to mark 100 ° C and then maybe Fahrenheit's dumb ice ammonium chloride brine to mark -17.7778 ° C, then figuring out how far apart they should be in millimeters on the thermometer (er, somehow). I can already think of several confounding variables with that though, most notably atmospheric pressure.

I feel like the most important thing to get would be a length measurement since you can then get a 1 gram mass from a cubic centimeter of distilled water.

That's as far as I got with this thought experiment before deciding to ask the internet. I actually asked on Reddit a while back but never got any responses.

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[–] burgersc12@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

Can we improve things a bit? Hoping we can get a calendar with no leap year, even number of days in each month, no daylight savings, etc

Edit: obviously no one got what i meant. We can base the day of the year on whatever the fuck you want, but for the love of god can we not split it into twelve randomly numbered chunks, i hate how our months are!!

[–] A_A@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

...calendar with no leap year ...

This would need the Earth to make one complete rotation around the Sun in an exact whole number of times it rotates around itself. ...which is not the case right now and extremely difficult (meaning near impossible) to change.

...no daylight savings...

Okay but now we have a greater problem : we have to change (twice, a year) the time when business, school , stores etc... open and close, for it to be convenient with outside natural light. So, in my opinion, this is not an improvement.

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