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Comment by f33d5173 | Hacker News Reader

A mile is exactly 1000 paces, or 4000 feet. You may disagree, but consider: the word mile come from latin for "one thousand". Therefore a mile must be 1000 of something, namely paces. I hope you find this argument convincing.

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5000, but a slightly shorter foot than the modern one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Roman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measure...

There is a "metric mile" which is 1500 m. This is something in the context of track and field athletics.

There is also a "metric gallon", or 4L.

Not to be confused with the 1600 meter or "1 mile" race which is commonly run in US track and field events (i.e. 4 times around a 400 meter track). At least that's within 1% of an actual mile.

Same with a Metric ton (a "tonne") which is one thousand kilograms (pretty close to an imperial ton).

Maybe after society has collapsed and been rebuilt we'll end up with km and cm having a weird ratio to the meter. Same for kg. At least celsius is just about impossible to screw up.

Celsius is already screwed up because it's not zero-based.

Celcius is eminently practical (similar to power of two prefixes). Absolute zero is completely irrelevant for day to day human life.

Fahrenheit is even more practical for daily life, as it was designed to be.

How so? 0 = freezing water, 100 = boiling water is at least more useful than more or less arbitrary points of F.

Celsius is just as arbitrary as farenheit so I wouldn't be so sure.

Webster’s dictionary defines a mile as …

I think your comment is supposed to be sarcastic, but I'm not sure what the sarcasmcis about? Yes, a mile is 1000 paces. That is why it's called a mile. It's not an "argument", it's just what a mile is.

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