Can anyone clarify something?

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

About the units of length:

 

10 inches = 3 hands = 1 foot

3 feet = 1 pace

2 paces = 1 span

1000 spans = 1 mile

4 miles = 1 league.

 

I cant understand...10 inches obviously doesnt equal 1 foot.

 

So which is the distance in real life. Are 10 inches in Randland actually 10 inches in the real life, or is 1 foot in Randland 1 foot in real life?

 

[RobertAlexWillis]

Because inches are used as the irreducible standard of comparison, Randland inches are probably the same as English inches.  Which makes a Randland foot slightly smaller than an English foot.  Making a Randland mile equal to approximately 0.947 English miles.

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Thanks RAW, thats what I was thinking too.  :)

[Luckers]

Really? Because that made me go crosseyed.

[callandor]

i kinda got a pace as one stride. like if you're walking kinda fast. i guess a span if you are sprinting. the hands though were kinda pointless for me. 1/3 of 10 inches? and 60,000 inches equal one randland mile. how many inhes in a normal mile?

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Possibly, hand was meant to be thought of as the width of a hand, not the length....

 

And I have actually never heard of inches in Randland, so maybe that is the conversion, but not an actual unit in the WoT world.

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Well, sorry for the double.

 

But the White Tower is supposed to be 100 spans tall. That equals 500 real life feet.

 

Now how tall would that amount to being? Thats 51 floors, assuming each floor is 10 feet tall and starting with the ground floor.

 

Now, to put that into perspective, its about half the height of the empire state building.

 

So, even for Ogier stonemasons, I would say that is quite a feat.

 

Plus, we must consider that there are several basement levels, and that the novices and accepted don't actually have rooms within the Tower. There are 2 accepted buildings in the Aes Sedai compound, attached to the back end of the Tower, which can hold about 200 accepted, and there are 2 novice buildings, attached to the back of the Tower as well, which can hold 400 novices.

 

There are rooms for 3000 or more Aes Sedai in the Tower.

 

And I think, once the LB is all over, the Asha'man will move into the huge palace Elaida is having built across from the White Tower.

 

I cant seem to find much information/description on the layout of the Aes Sedai compound, other than the info on the Tower itself. There should facilities for warders, buildings and a training yard, and, according to the map, a park or two.

 

I can help but think that the novice and accepted compounds would make the building seem very much like the capitol building in D.C.

 

Also, I have heard that the roleplay book has more detailed maps. If this is true, perhaps someone could show me a map of Tar Valon, other than the one in the BWB?

[Siemba]

If I remember right, measuements used to be based on body ratios (agggees ago) and so were approximate rather than a standard. Could it be that in Randland, which is not as advanced in that,  what counts as, say, a span depends on the size of the person whose POV we are reading from?

Or is that just silly? :D

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Nope, it certainly makes sense.

 

I actually heard a story a long time ago, probably just a myth, about body ratio measurements.

 

The story goes that a King was trying to figure out what to give his wife for her birthday. He thought, and thought, and thought, trying to figure out what she didnt have, since she had almost everything she would ever need.

 

So finally, he comes up with the idea for a bed. So he measures her for the bed, and he decides the bed should be 10 feet long. He goes to the carpenter and commissions him to make the bed.

 

The carpenter, upon completion, gives the bed to the King. When the Queen lays in it, however, it is too short. The King, furious, demands to know why the measurements were incorrect. The carpenter replies that they were correct, then goes to measure it out with his own feet, showing it to indeed be 10 feet.

 

The King then has his foot cast in iron, and issues a decree that makes his "foot" the standard of measurement forevermore.

[Siemba]

Perhaps whoever wins the LB will create a cast iron foot :D Nice story, Ealdur, cheers for posting it! It proves Im not mad :D

[RobertAlexWillis]

As a matter of information (for Callandor, and anyone else interested) an English mile is 5280 feet, or 63360 inches.  Since a Randland mile is 60000 inches, it is 60000/63360 English miles, or 0.947 ...

 

-sigh-

 

I can't wait until enough Americans get educations and we can go metric ....

[The Lost One]

How is that last word pronounced? "metric"

 

Is it like "me trick" - your playing a trick on me

 

or is it

 

"Met Rick" - I once met a guy named Rick?

 

I tried looking it up, but it states that it has been removed from all the American dictionairies....go figure!

[Hero of Satsuma]

I wonder if Randland is going to have as hard of a time switching to the metric system as we Americans are.  I was in third grade when we started learning the metric system.  It was supposed to be this great thing and we would be better for having learned it.  Well, I learned it (I'm an engineer, of course I learned it).  It has been more than 20 years since I was in third grade and the last time I checked, I still have to buy milk by the gallon.

 

Lame.....

[Cadsuane]

I can't wait until enough Americans get educations and we can go metric ....

 

Please God, PLEASE can we do this soon?! Considering the state of our education program, it's not as if very many Americans actually know our current measurment system well, so we should suck it up and make the change. Think how much easier some maths would be! :P

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

How is that last word pronounced? "metric"

 

Is it like "me trick" - your playing a trick on me

 

or is it

 

"Met Rick" - I once met a guy named Rick?

 

I tried looking it up, but it states that it has been removed from all the American dictionairies....go figure!

 

It's Met Rick, or Meh Trick. Thats how I have always said it, and its how I've always heard it said...

[Charlz Guybon]

About the units of length:

 

10 inches = 3 hands = 1 foot

3 feet = 1 pace

2 paces = 1 span

1000 spans = 1 mile

4 miles = 1 league.

 

I cant understand...10 inches obviously doesnt equal 1 foot.

 

So which is the distance in real life. Are 10 inches in Randland actually 10 inches in the real life, or is 1 foot in Randland 1 foot in real life?

 

 

Here's a good site on WoT measurements http://www.personal.ars-informatica.ca/paul/wot/wot.php?page=measures

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Thats a pretty good site, thanks.

 

But if I work the measurements out, the portal stone columns end up being 15 real life feet tall.

 

I had always envisioned them being more like 3 feet tall.

[trakand01]

Possibly, hand was meant to be thought of as the width of a hand, not the length....

 

And I have actually never heard of inches in Randland, so maybe that is the conversion, but not an actual unit in the WoT world.

 

The Hand is actually the age-old method of measuring horses, and is the hand with fingers splayed out as far as possible whilst keeping the hand flat, and the actual measurement is tip of little finger to tip of thumb.

[Mashiara O Aan.a--ein]

length of a hand...very interesting tidbit

 

I don't mind centimeters or liters, but if we ever switch to kilometers, I'll just shoot myself  :'(

 

Imagine driving along and checking that speedometer....____ km/hr.....____ km until you reach Las Vegas

 

Nah...I'll just go start my own country...first oath of allegiance

"I hereby swear to uphold the mile and the feet and the inches"  ;D

[Despair]

Interesting tidbits.  The yard was supposedly the length from King Henry I's nose to the tip of his fingers. Also, supposedly King Henry I's foot was exactly 12 inches long.  It gives it a nice English spin.  Since Henry lived about 1060, and tailors were using the basis of a man's actual foot since the B.C. times, this seems like the best answer.  It was a matter of standardization.  Remember, the sun revolved around the earth, the earth was flat, and Britain was at the center.  It stayed this way for over 700 years.

 

So back to Randland. We have all kind of questioned.  It seems that RJ throws around spans and paces like no tomorrow. Mathematically we can prove he does.  He mentions a tree in the first book (or second) that is 30 spans around. 1 span = 5 feet = 50 inches, so the circumference of the tree is 1,500 inches or 125 feet.  Using P at 3.14, the diameter of the tree should be around 40 feet.  And we arent talking a Tolkien Elf tree, but a large one they took shelter under.  At 40', the tree should be about 500+ feet tall.  Also in Book 1, he describes the bridge in Whitebridge as being 50 spans high. So that is 208 feet high.  Although the Golden Gate Bridge is 746 ft high, the road level is only 220 ft above the water.  Dont get me going on the White Tower or Cairhein's topless towers. Remember, before the Aeil wars, they were over 2000 feet tall, built by man withoutR the Ogier or the Power. 

 

So anytime RJ gives a measurement, I kind of readjust to my own imagination.

 

Also, 1 hand = 4 inches.

[Charlz Guybon]

  Using P at 3.14, the diameter of the tree should be around 40 feet.  And we arent talking a Tolkien Elf tree, but a large one they took shelter under.  At 40', the tree should be about 500+ feet tall.

You can't neccessarily guess a tree's hieght by it's width. I saw the oldest maple tree in New York state, about 350 years old, and though it was over a dozen feet thick, it was only 25-30 feet tall. Quite short and squat.

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Well, that is certainly true, but still, going by Randland measurements the tree would still have ridiculous size.

[Charlz Guybon]

  Also in Book 1, he describes the bridge in Whitebridge as being 50 spans high. So that is 208 feet high.  Although the Golden Gate Bridge is 746 ft high, the road level is only 220 ft above the water.  Dont get me going on the White Tower or Cairhein's topless towers. Remember, before the Aeil wars, they were over 2000 feet tall, built by man withoutR the Ogier or the Power. 

 

 

 

First of all a span is equivlant to six feet in the real world, not five.

 

Secondly, while I can see a bridge made with the power being that large, Jordan must have made a mistake on the topless towers. The White Tower is mentioned repeatedly as the tallest structure in the known world and it's 500 feet high.

[Ealdur Tinuviel]

Exactly. The topless towers, if they were 2000 feet high, would be twice the height of the Empire State building.