twelve yards ? So ridiculously long?

I thought you implied that it was a mistake to say that angles can be measured in degrees, minutes and seconds.

Incidentally, I think I read somewhere that minutes are so called because when clockmaking technology advanced enough that clocks could show not just the hours, but also reliably subdivide them, the new graduations were called "minutes" (being very small), and later still when minutes could be subdivided, the new divisions were called "second minutes". There has never been any need for "third minutes", I suppose because by the time sufficiently accurate clocks were practical, the decimal system had been adopted by scientists.

Yes, i see how that would have sounded as though i were saying it were a mistake. I wasn't thinking in terms of plane geometry, but rather was thinking of navigation. As, i believe, the use of minutes and seconds to subdivide degrees derives from navigational chronometry, that is what i tought of. The first voyage of James Cook to the Pacific was intended to be one of several observations of the transit of Venus in order to refine celestial navigation. When John Barrow, Second Secretary of the Admiralty (and therefore the "permanent" civil servant responsible for operational planning) sent out cartographic expeditions in the 1820s and -30s, they were charged with making chronometric observations. The second voyage of HMS Beagle was a circumnavigation for just that reason.

I agree, Ori, really dumb but styles are styles. That amount of fabric would be needed to cover the hoops and simply by using a lot of yardage it would have created a posh/expensive/stylish sense, which was obviously the intended affect.