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kilometre (km) or kilometer is a metric unit used, outside the US, to measure the length of a journey; the international statute mile (mi) is used in the US; 1 mi = 1.609344 km; nautical mile is rarely used to derive units of transportation quantity.
In the United States, the term statute mile formally refers to the survey mile, [3] but for most purposes, the difference of less than 1 ⁄ 8 inch (3.2 mm) between the survey mile and the international mile (1609.344 metres exactly) is insignificant—one international mile is 0.999 998 US survey miles—so statute mile can be used for either.
For measuring length, the U.S. customary system uses the inch, foot, yard, and mile, which are the only four customary length measurements in everyday use.From 1893, the foot was legally defined as exactly 1200 ⁄ 3937 m (approximately 0.304 8006 m). [13]
In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures" developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263 348 451 743 817 321 6473 mm. [4]
A variety of units of measurement were used in the various independent Italian states and Italian dependencies of foreign empires up to the unification of Italy in the 19th century. The units to measure length, volume, mass, etc., could differ widely between countries or between towns in a country (e.g. Rome and Ancona), but usually not between ...
The micrometre (SI symbol: μm) is a unit of length in the metric system equal to 10 −6 metres ( 1 / 1 000 000 m = 0. 000 001 m). To help compare different orders of magnitude , this section lists some items with lengths between 10 −6 and 10 −5 m (between 1 and 10 micrometers , or μm).
[9] It is approximately equal to 1.0936 yd. Other SI units are derived from the meter by adding prefixes, as in millimeter or kilometer, thus producing systematic decimal multiples and submultiples of the base unit that span many orders of magnitude. For example, a kilometer is 1000 m.
When planning his journey across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1480s, Columbus mistakenly assumed that the mile referred to in the Arabic estimate of 56 + 2 / 3 miles for the size of a degree was the same as the actually much shorter Italian mile of 1,480 metres. His estimate for the size of the degree and for the circumference of the Earth ...