On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 16:40:41 -0500, "Bob (this one)" >
wrote:


>Exactly so. The merchants and traders standardized the units between
>and amongst themselves. They had to in order to get and give equal
>value. You mistake what was happening then with the world we live in
>now. There was no governing body to establish and certify all the
>measure units.

Nonsense. This was already old hat when Hammurabi included such
provisions in his Code of Laws some 3750 years ago.

Government regulators have been involved in this for a long, long
time.

Sure, measurements of this sort go back a few millennia earlier, into
prehistoric times when nobody had any written language to tell us
about it. But the way you put it was pretty misleading.

Gene Nygaard