It's not strange. It's an emergent domain-specific measurement that means something to practitioners within that domain. What's strange is chopping off the hea

It's not strange. It's an emergent domain-specific measurement that means something to practitioners within that domain. What's strange is chopping off the head of a bunch of French aristocrats because ergot poisoning drove you mad, and then replacing old emergent domain-specific measurements with something new because those old measurements just aren't rational, and you're clearly very rational, obviously, because what could be more rational than tearing a bunch of people from their homes and chopping off their heads? Their world order was clearly arbitrary and irrational, and evil! So with that oppressive old world order extinguished, you're now impelled to conjure new, more rational unit definitions like "one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris", which is in no way arbitrary, and is of course very rational and sensible. And from this day henceforth, the ploughman shall no longer measure his land in terms of the area that a pair of oxen can plow in a day (1 acre), but in terms of the square of "one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris" - the meter! The meter is rational, scientific, even noble, yes indeed.