The Associated Pressreports Judge Arthur Engoron of the New York Supreme Court’s 1st Judicial District ruled in a civil suit that Trump, his company-the Trump Organization-and other defendants including his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and longtime chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, lied to banks, insurers, and others by massively exaggerating the value of his assets and net worth in documents used to secure deals and financing. Their survey resulted in a value for the meter equal to “one ten-millionth part of a meridional quadrant of the earth.” Other units came from the precisely defined meter. Before we dive into the minutiae of metric, let’s elaborate a bit more on the history of the world’s measuring system and how it came to take its modern form, the Système International d’Unités — the International System of Units, or SI. The commission named the unit of length “metre” (“meter” in the U.S.), after the Greek word metron, which means “to measure.” Next came the task of actually determining the exact length of a meter. Metrologists call this a coherent unit. Because kg-m/s2 is a little cumbersome and because force is such an important quantity in physics, SI bigwigs decided to call the derived unit a newton, in honor of Sir Isaac.

With the partition of India and Pakistan on 15 August 1947, the army was reconstituted and divided between the two new Dominions, with the process overseen by Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck. Several UN Security Council resolutions were passed, with Resolution 47 calling for a plebiscite to be held in Kashmir to determine accession to India or Pakistan, only after Pakistan withdrew its army from Kashmir. By the end of the war, India had resumed control of all the territory south and east of the Line of Control, as was established in July 1972 per the Shimla Accord. At the end of war, the serjeant-major was recognizable by a pair of cloth epaulettes. Upon its creation in 1790, the National Assembly requested the French Academy of Sciences to “deduce an invariable standard for all measures and all weights.” The academy in turn appointed a commission to develop the system, with the stipulation that the final solution should be at once simple, yet scientific. Each of those instruments comes marked in standard units to make sure the measurement of one observer matches that of another observer.

In theory, each standard unit would trace its lineage back to a single prototype — the archetypal example of that particular unit. The modern metric system can trace its roots back to Gabriel Mouton, the vicar of St. Paul’s Church in Lyon, France, and a notable astronomer and mathematician. Not only are you allowed to eat roadkill in West Virginia, you don’t even have to wait for the cops to tag the animal if you want to take a dead deer home for dinner, as of 2015. If you hit a bear or turkey on the road, take heed — you have to wait for the cops to show up and tag the creature before you can take your kill home and feed the family. There are about seventeen identified in official records. In 1670, Mouton conceived of a system of measurement based on the length of one minute of longitude (remember that there are 60 minutes in each degree of longitude and latitude). There have been some critical revisions to the electronic filing procedures that have been in place. These, too, were officially recognized by the French government and stored in a safe place so copies could be made as needed.

With the French government on the verge of financial collapse, King Louis XVI convened the Estates General — an assembly made up of representatives from the country’s various classes — to levy new taxes. In 1875, a special assembly in Paris brought together representatives from 17 nations, including the U.S. A few derived units are significant enough to have earned special SI names and symbols. The International System of Units is the modern form of the metric system, and although the two names are used interchangeably, SI is more accurate technically. The accompanying table lists some of the approved prefix names and symbols. In the SI, making units larger and smaller requires nothing more than adding a prefix. An ant’s length may be 0.003 meters, but it’s much more practical to describe something that small in millimeters. That tells us that an ant is 3 millimeters (3 mm) from its head to its abdomen. For example, let’s say you wanted to measure the length of an ant. Now let’s say you have a cube measuring 1 meter on each side. This was the first incarnation of the metric system, which France officially adopted in 1795. Four years later, scientists fashioned standards for the meter and kilogram out of platinum.