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APRIL 25, 1968 - Relieved of the tension and suspense, Lion Storey Beare of the Port Perry Lions Club [left] shows delight after being ' 60 YEARS AGO Thursday, June 15, 1921 The ladies of the Methodist Church will hold a Strawberry Festival and Garden Party on the lawns of Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Real's home. The ground at Beechcroft will be open to the public elected to the post of Deputy-District Governor at the Spring Rally in Cobourg. With Storey are his wife Doris, brother Bill and his wife Betty. every day through the season. A number of young citizens have recently had evidence of their advancement in education. Miss Follick has received her B.A., Anson Walker his M.A, (Turn to page 6) Hedy A SEF WA AE »d oT - . AR HEE PARE 5 Ther CLT RISEN EAI ] { i f) chotterbox The dictionary gives the meaning of the word "vandal" as one who willfully destroys things of beauty. This word describes fully the persons responsible for the acts of destruction which occurred to the decorative planters and the plants and flowers in them this past weekend. ' Why do people destroy property that does not belong to them? Do they think it is fun? Do they dislike those responsible for the project? Was it done on a dare by a friend? Do they have nothing better to do? The questions. could go on forever. Vandalism is not new to our township. Over the years there * have been many things destroyed by vandals. The grave- stones in the Prince Albert cemetery, the washrooms at the park, the exterior and interior of schools throughout the township, picnic tables in the parks, store windows broken and the list could go on. Possibly one way of helping to control vandalism would be to have those responsible punished. I don't mean by paying a fine or spending a few days in jail, but by physically having to make restitution to the owners for the damage. This could be " accomplished by waking those convicted purchase new plants and then t .ke shovel in hand and re-plant them in those planters thut were damaged. The same type of penalty may well work with other acts of vandalism. For instance: in the case of a ransacked school, make them clean the mess and pay for the damage: or toppled gravestones would have:to be fixed and damages. payed for out of pocket. Possibly the embarrassment they would have in being seen repairing damage they created might help to deter them and others from similar acts of destruction in the future. ' BUDDING CARTOONIST The Star would like to welcome this week Mike Stokes to the editorial pages of this newspaper. Mike is a grade twelve student at Port Perry High School who has a flair with pen and ink, and for the next couple of by J. Peter Hvidsten months (at least) he will'entertain us with local cartoons. If there is an issue, and we at the Star can come off with a good idea, then Mike will be there making his point by way of the editorial cartoon. We hope you will like this lighthearted way of editorial izing, and wish Mike the best in his efforts over the summer. * r Jr PORT PERRY STAR -- Wednesday, June 17, 1981 -- § Lf Fiat STATA a De £67 » $= oil i letters Metric nonsense 609 F. Street, Anchorage, Alaska 99501 Dear Sirs, I wonder how many Canadians are aware of the incongruity of using Kkilo- metre road signs with land surveyed in square mile sections? Since roads in the country usually follow the perimeters of a farmer's land, he could always reckon his distances in miles. The effect of using kilometres is total confusion, especially since they have no scientific base like the mile. Why is this so? To have , any value, a land measure- ment must reflect a compat- ible time-distance relation- ship. Consider the Egyptians with their cubit. These An- cients reckoned the earth's rotational velocity at the equator per second, which is 1520.005 ft., and made their cubit 1-1000th. part of this -- 1.520 ft. or 18.24 inches. So 1000 cubits represented the distance the earth moved each second. It moved 4,000 cubits every 4 seconds -- the nautical mile (1 minute of arc), 60,000 cubits (15 nautical miles) every minute, and so on for a complete revolution in 24 hours. There was thus total harmoney in olden times between distance and time through the cubit as there is with the nautical mile today. However, the Anglo- Saxons were equally as astute in metrology as the Ancients. They had, according to Ben Turner, a metrologist from Birming- ham, Ala., a two-part system of length measurement. The linear units for straight lines were the digit (.72"), the fathom (72"), the inch and the foot (12 inches The linear units for land measures were based on an 11:10 ration, presumably to take the curvature of the earth into account. The link was 7.92" (.66 ft.) against 72" (.06 ft.) for the digit. The 10 links (79.2"") or 6.6 ft. of the Anglo-Saxon rod was an 11:10 ratio with the 6 ft. (72) of the fathom. (Naturally, fathoms and feet, used for measuring depths and altitudes, were straight line measures). The 100 links of the chain at 792.0" or 66.0 ft., and the 1,000 links of the furlong at 7920.00" or 660 ft. make up the sides of a rectangular acre of 43,560 ed ft. The Anglo-Saxon rod of 6.6 ft. or 79.2", Mr. Turner continues, is exactly double the true measure of the metre at 39.6", and relates to a ten millionth part of half the earth's circumference (not a quarter) and allowed it to coincide with the 12-hour clock. Further, take from the 43,560 sq. ft. of the acre the 360 degrees of the earth's circumference and we are left with 42,200, which is the exact number of seconds in 12 hours! We now see how links, chains and acres all scientif- ically fit together and relate distance to time. The 10 chains or 660 ft. of the furlong logically lead on to the mile (8 furlongs), and the square mile or section with its 640 acres, and the 36-section township (6 square miles). How easy it is to divide up 640 acre sections compared to the ten bases of square kilometres: (320, 160, 80, 40, 20, 10, 5, against 10, 5, 21% etc. hectares). Pre-metric French metrology was, ironically, equally as scientific. The counterpart of the fathom was the Toise de Perou standard, which had 864 lines (lignes) in its six feet (pieds). Why the figure 864? There are 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour time span. 864 is one - hundredth part of that number. Despite the opposition of prominent French scien- tists like Pierre Laplace (Turn to page 6) - "WHO NEEDS PoPLAR PARK? AS You CAN SEE BIRDSEYE Is B16 ENOUGH." 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