Metre not meter.
What a fabulous post.
Good bits of humour, lots of sarcasm and some seriously useful information. And so far no brawls; even though someone mention ?taildraggers.?
Let me get my ?units beef? out of the way first, because this will be a long post and nobody will bother to read to the end.
Choose! Metric or Imperial? But don?t ever have a rivet that is 3.5 of 3/32 long. How dumb to mix decimals and fractions in the one mouthful.
OK! Got that out of the way.
Now let?s get this straight. The USA has officially been Metric for over one hundred years since Grover was the boss.
In 1875, the United States solidified its commitment to the development of the internationally recognized metric system by becoming one of the original seventeen signatory nations to the Metric Convention.
Don?t believe me. Google ?Metrication in the United States wiki?.
I was bought up in Australia in the late 16th century when we used Imperial bits.
Whilst I was at college, Australia change to Metric.
So I?m ambidextrous and I know most Americans would give their right arm to be ambidextrous. Particularly if they were working on the Mars Orbiter.
And the use of 60 seconds is no more arbitrary (as someone suggested) than 16oz in a pint of US beer. (Poms feel cheated. They want 20oz of warm, flat, liquid amber). There are 60 seconds in an hour because the Babylonians used a sexagesimal (Base 60) system. And they invented the Rolex; or something similar. So they have a patent time.
There are a lot of comments in this post stating that some unit is arbitrary. No units are arbitrary. They relate to the ?Kings? Foot?, the ?Pharaoh's Arm? or something. They might seem antiquated, but they were chosen for a reason.
Sure, the metric System has some drawbacks, (it was invented by Man) most notably because we have ten digits on our hands. Eight would have made for a much better system. Dividing by two would be easy.
Certainly, conversion between Fahrenheit and Celcius would be easier if they had the same zero point, (ie. Zero at the freezing point of water) so that a simple rule of thumb could be used without having to account for the 32? offset. This is because Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit did not use the same
zero datum point as the Celsius scale uses, that is freezing water, instead using a frigorific Brine mixture which occurs at 32?F below the freezing point of water.
As someone pointed out knots, come from sailors who through a
log overboard with a knotted rope attached and counted the knots paying out to estimate their speed. They wrote the result in a ?
Logbook?. So if you don?t use knots you should be using an accountants ledger or a scrap of paper. But not a logbook.
Another post wondered why to the ?one-in-sixty rule? ,1:60 (60:1?) rule works.
It works because the Tan of a small angle is equal to 1/60th of the angle.
The problem is not so much that the Metric system or the Imperial system is superior, but rather that the Metric System has been adopted in the US by the Army, university and countless other organisations and not by the country as a whole.
Finally here is a map showing all the other developed countries in the World that DON?T use the Metric system.
Pete.
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/994/metricmap.gif