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.) This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested
against the platinum-iridium cons cell in Paris.
Compare
golden.