Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured.
Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually
been cast in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside
the Standard Kilogram at the International Bureau of Weights and
Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to 1960, the meter was defined to be
the distance between two scratches in a platinum-iridium bar kept in
that same vault -- this replaced an earlier definition as 10^-7 times
the distance between the North Pole and the Equator along a meridian
through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact value
of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined
to be 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86
propagating in a vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path
traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458
of a second. The kilogram is now the only unit of measure officially
defined in terms of a unique artifact. But this will have to change;
in 2003 it was revealed that the reference kilogram has been shedding
mass over time, and is down by 50 micrograms.) "This
garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the
platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris." Compare {golden}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {golden}]