## Metadata - Author: [[James Vincent]] - Full Title: Beyond Measure - Category: #books ## Highlights - measurement, like speech and play, is a cornerstone of cognition. ([Location 42](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=42)) - measurement is a mirror to society itself; it is a form of attention that reveals what we value in the world. To measure is to choose; to focus your attention on a single attribute and exclude all others. ([Location 68](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=68)) - The earliest evidence for what we might describe as measurement comes in the form of animal bones carved with notches. These metrological relics include the Ishango Bone, a baboon fibula between 18,000 and 20,000 years old, and the Wolf Bone, older still at roughly 33,000 years in age. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=82)) - The calculations of Kepler are sometimes thought of as the first ‘natural laws’ of science, in that they are unchanging, precise, and verifiable. Their authority is a product of their universality: their predictions are applicable not just to this planet at this time but to all planets across time and space. In other words, they are generalised, abstract rules – qualities essential to the development of measurement. ([Location 175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=175)) - if you were to summarise the history of measurement in a single sentence, it would be as a history of increasing abstraction. ([Location 178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=178)) - The Māori have derived at least twelve units from the body, from the smallest, the konui, equal to the first joint of the thumb, to the largest, the takoto, which measures the full length of the body with both arms raised above the head. ([Location 186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=186)) - As the historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, metric units are in some ways ‘the most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution’. ([Location 227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09TQ345FX&location=227))