Group IV: Measurement Data

The measurement lab of week 8 made us use gromas, stakes, and rope in order to learn how to make straight lines, right-angles, and learn the magic of measurement from the ancient world!

The 30-Minute Road

After construction of our groma and knotted rope, we could start our measurement adventures. First we started with construction of a road with a few right-angle turns. The groma uses the the strings lined up in a row of three to create a straight line which would be quite difficult to do for a long distance otherwise. Given thirty minutes we started off on our road and tracked our distance along the way.

Sorry for the corrupted images below.

Measurements from groma to next stake (ft’ and in”)

First Line	(Right Turn) Second Line	(Left Turn) Third Line
26′ 4”	19′ 8”	25′ 6”
45′ 4”	38′ 1”	45′ 7”
64′ 10”	56′ 8”	67′ 5”
86′ 8”		88′ 9”
106′ 0”		111′ 8”
126′ 4”		133′ 3”
143′ 0”		162′ 2”
161′ 5”		183′ 0”
182′ 3”		204′ 5”
202′ 6”		226′ 1”
223′ 10”		TOTAL: 506′ 7”

These were the measurements that I made along the way with our road. The total average distance between the groma and the next stake is 18 feet and 4 inches. Our data also is able to tell us that we got more familiar with the groma/stake distance overtime, as some of our initial measurements had variable distances, but as we progressed into the later-half of our road-making we averaged more around ~20′ in our distances. I only measured after stakes were placed as to not influence markings of the stakes. Though we were working on a flat field we felt more comfortable working as a group and with our groma after our thirty minutes.

Soothsayer Square

Next we made a quick square for making observation-zones for soothsayers. We made a simple square by marking a center point and marking corners 5ft away from the center and using our right angles to complete the square from the center. After making a quick square we all stood inside and looked for birdsign. Jonah, who was standing in the right antica (the north-west quadrant) saw 8 birds fly from one tree to another. We don’t know what this means, but we were happy to see some sort of birds.

Making Augustus’ Plan for Grids with Roads

Using a similar square to the one we had just made, we marked a center point and made an even larger square around it 20ft from the original center point. With these areas staked we could use these areas could help us make the quadrants and roads we wanted. We struggled with the sprinklers popping up in the middle of our camp making but we took on the project anyway and chalked it up the experience. We decided we would not want to use the groma in the rain since it requires you to stand still and get wet.

It seems unlike other lab groups we relied heavily on the groma to make our lines and decided this was quite time and labour intensive but we were happy with our lines so there might be a trade off to using it as well.

Land of Uneven Boundary

Our group decided to attempt to measure the Evans dorm building as it sits half on a large hill and we thought this might provide an interesting challenge for us.

Using our new-found groma skillz we made a rectangle around evans. Our measurement of the rectangle ended up being near a square!! However this is likely very inaccurate as the only device we had to measure this length of distance was our handy wheel-on-a-stick but since we were dealing with a large hill the upward slope likely largely affected our measurement results. This took us a much longer time than anticipated (probably since Evans is a large building) so we only had time to make one triangle to cut out of our square. We used our rope for the first time in the lab to make a 3:4:5 triangle to make a right angle (pictured above in the left top corner). We did theorize how with a bigger rope we could cut out much longer sections making the process a little easier. I think if we did this for the whole lab we might have been able to figure out the area!

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Overall I’d say this lab took a lot of teamwork and coordination especially in comparison to our other labs thus far this term. The data collection was also difficult to consider all of the errors that could occur throughout the process. For example, we measured 5ft from the center points when we were making our squares 5ft across but then realized we had to the math for the rest of the square (5/sqrt(2) for the legs) and that was even more confusing using a measurement tool that only had feet and inches. Our group found ways to have fun but felt exhausted after and decided we’d rather dedicate our lives to shepherding and cheesemaking.