Historical Quest In the Boston Museum
of Fine arts is a display of carefully made stone cubes
found in the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro of the Indus. The stones
are a set of weights that exhibit the binary pattern,
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ... . The fundamental unit displayed is
just a bit lighter than the ounce in the U.S. measurement
system. The old European standard of 16 oz for 1 pound
may be a relic of the same idea. Write a paper showing
how a set of such stones can successfully be used to measure
any reasonable given weight of more than one unit.
