Category talk:Human-based units of measurement

Era, Epoch
The Era and Epoch are time intervals specified by humans, but I'm not sure they're appropriate for this category. Advice on whether I should add this would be appreciated. --Cybercobra 05:18, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Right, I'm saying no because they're not based on human abilities or parts of the human body, but rather culture instead, which isn't in the scope of this cat. --Cybercobra (talk) 16:53, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Rubberbands and Zero Gee
For human-powered spaceflight, the distance you are driven by a large rubberband, properly extended and released, depends on your mass and the mass of the rubberband, times the length that it is drawn? I will naturally assume you have a large number of giant rubberbands (either worn, or carried in a backpack), and there is no atmospheric friction to prevent you from travelling as far as you want to. A six foot rubberband, then, could probably propel you quite a ways, assuming there were a way of stretching it, and letting it go. In that sense, then, a rubberband is a human-based unit of measure. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 04:05, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Mistake to include entire systems
I don't see how an entire national system of units can be human-based. System implies simple numerical relationships, which in turns that some if not most of the units are derived. Notice that the systems listed here are all "Oriental" and thus presumably "exotic." This smacks of Orientalism.


 * Ancient Arabic units of measurement
 * Ancient Greek units of measurement
 * Ancient Mesopotamian units of measurement
 * Biblical and Talmudic units of measurement
 * Hindu units of measurement
 * Obsolete Tatar units of measurement
 * Traditional Turkish units of measurement

Zyxwv99 (talk) 21:48, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the entire systems aren't human-based. But they all have some unit(s) which are but don't have independent articles, hence, the article on the system as a whole is categorized as the closest possible approximation to categorizing the individual units. --Cyber cobra (talk) 22:41, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Aren't all non-Metric/SI systems of units in some sense human-based, that is, developed by humans from their experience? In fact, wasn't Metric conceived to use such contrived units as not to favor any particular human-based system? The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the pole to the equator, a trip no one would make until that Monty Python guy. Fahrenheit developed his temperature scale based on human experience: he defined 0 deg as about as cold as it got, and 100 as about as hot as it got.--MajorHazard (talk) 18:16, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Anthropic units
claims this category is only for anthropic units and so has removed Phon from this category. I'm having trouble understanding exactly what constitutes an anthropic unit or why this category is not called anthropic units. ~Kvng (talk) 16:03, 3 February 2019 (UTC)


 * , note that I reverted myself pretty much right after since the category isn't named after anthropic units. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)