Gene Nygaard wrote in message . ..

Channeling a curmudgeon for some reason - must be the fact that I've
been getting skunked by the weather for two weeks.


Well, now, in this fuzzy dreamworld you inhabit, what exactly is the
standard for a pound?

Probably the original standard was 1.397 the weekly average of the
King's morning BM.

What is the nature of this standard? Something electrical, something
mechanical, or what?

Scatalogical

Who made it the standard? When exactly was it made the standard (just
the year will do)?

The King, of course, who else? And of course it changed from
generation to generation, just like the inch.

Where is the standard kept, and who maintains it?

A silver "repository" in a palace somewhere.
Now for the bonus question:

In addition to the system in which slugs are the units of mass, there
is another, much older English foot-pound-second system in which the
poundal is the derived unit of force. It is the force which will
accelerate the base unit of mass in this oldest English subsystem of
coherent mechanical units at a rate of 1 ft/s². Now, fill in the
blank, please: The base unit of mass in this oldest fps system is the
_____________. (Hint: it is the "p" in this fps system.)

When the poundal system was invented back around 1879, not only did
slugs not exist but also pounds force had never been well-defined
units. This was before anybody ever started picking some "standard
acceleration of gravity" which is an essential ingredient in the
definition of those pounds force. Even today, pounds force don't have
an official definition, at least in the United States. We often
borrow the value for the standard acceleration of gravity which is
official (adopted by the CGPM in 1901, long after the poundal system
was in use and the dyne system in cgs units) for the purpose of
defining kilograms force, i.e. 9.80665 m/s². But other values are
also used for this purpose, such as 32.16 ft/s² (you still commonly
see this used in ballistics with a formula for kinetic energy in a
foot-grain-pound force-second system E = m v²/450240).


Let's keep it simple and just use kilograms x furlongs /
fortnight^2...