Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: A weighty subject



At 02:18 PM 14/10/99 -0500, paul o johnson wrote:
Robert Carlson wrote:

I do agree that PHYS-L is a place to talk about definitions and their
shortcomings. However, it is not the place to chuck them out or redefine
them.

Having said that, I've always thought the meter was too long.

I wonder if the French also thought that when it was forced down their throats.
The English and Americans had inches and feet, but how did the French measure
length before the revolution?

poj

The meter is definately too long. It should be a yard. Back in my old
Navy days when I was a navigator (actually I got called a "naviguesser" far
too often) we used nautical miles as our standard distance. A nautical
mile is 2 000 yards. A degree of latitude is 60 nuatical miles, so a
minute of latitude is 1 nautical mile or 2 000 yards. This was very
convienient as charts would always have the latitude scales printed across
them. It was very easy to take any distance that you measured with
dividers, set it on the vertical scale along the edge of the chart and read
off the distance. Meters, sadly, don't work like that. As a consequence,
the sailors don't want to give up yards for meters. The army has gone
metric, so, when we worked with them, we always had to convert distances
that we easily read off the chart into meters. This was a major pain.

It would have been ever so simple to define a meter as equal to 1 yard.

Glenn
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Physics Kahuna
Kahuna Physics Institute - on the flapping edge of physics research.