A nautical mile is essentially 1 arc second along a great circle of the earth. Boats and airplanes have the freedom to travel along great circles; therefore, nautical miles are very simple for navigation in boats and planes.
Agreed but the question was why was it defined in terms of so many inches. It never has been. It started out as 1/1000 of a kilometer and a kilometer was 1/10,000 the distance from pole to equator. Add the 3 zeros and a meter was basically defined a 1/10,000,000 the distance from the pole to the equator. The beauty of metric is never having to deal with 1/4, 1/8, 1/2, 12, 36, 5280 etc. and let's not even talk about things like rods, bushels, pecks, dry and wet quarts or dry and wet gallons. BTW how many feet and inches in a nautical mile? You just add and subtract zeros to make conversions in metric measure.
Add to that, science and medicine in the U.S. It's all I ever use at work, every day. However, back in engineering school we had to be able to use both SI and US Customary units. Car engines in Detroit make horsepower, not kilowatts. Then again, engineers are still programming in Fortran 77 (as in 1977!)
Yea I googled it too. Hard to believe the French , in 1793 the measured accuracy to 1 / 10,000,000 & came up with a meter. (metre) the distance from equator to the (ever moving) north pole . 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 0, 1 , 10, 100, 1000 , 10000 , 100000 _100001 World has gone from decimal to binary then converted to what ever numerical system you want ( Yea be nice to have one "logical" standard. But it's ok to be different too. In reality the USA uses both, maybe the only country that can
I'll start doing everything in cubitpints with nautical miles, inch meters, and fathoms. Then I'll convert from us horsepower to euro HP figures because those are not even the same.
That got me at work once because a crew came in with laser inspection equipment to measure whether a machine was shifting when we performed maintenance on it. They said it was accurate to two thousandths. Came to learn later that it was surveying gear quoting in feet, not inches. Boo.
0.0833 feet is an inch so 0.002 feet is pretty darn good for elevation differential. What kind of equipment is it?
That's a pretty map but I'm not quite so sure what their metric is as the U.K. still uses Imperial units. Not for everything, just as in the U.S.A. If monetary units are the metric then that big red country went metric a very long time ago.
I don't recall - Leica perhaps. I think they fixed prisms to the machine and their laser tracked the movement. The point was we really were looking for movement on the order of .005", and the whole exercise turned out to be a waste because of a miscommunication. David
Impressive. That's on the order of a width of a human hair! What kind of equipment are you using that needs a tight tolerance like that?
my screen name was given to me by a friend , the uncle part , because im 47 and act 67 because i am set in my ways and the fess part because i was trying to use festool power tools from germany and the metric adjustments made me nuts.
Metric vs. non-metric, use whatever is convenient it is kinda silly when you consider how the whole world measures the aspect of life that affects every individual every day the most..time Really 365.25 units in a year, each divided into 24 parts, subdivided into 60 and subdivided by 60 again, and yet we talk about decades, and centuries and millennia, and generations, and quarter hours, and milliseconds, and...and...and
Ha! Dave you obviously haven't spent much time in Canada. I remember well when Canada started converting to the metric system, USA was beginning to convert so Canada felt it should as well . Anybody who works strictly within the metric system can see the logic and benefits and how much easier it is to work with. It's the converting back and forth between Metric and Imperial systems that generally causes a headache. I remember we had to learn how to do these conversions and thinking %$#@ that, if we are going to convert to Metric, lets just do away with the old Imperial system and we don't have to keep getting those headaches calculating between Imperial and Metric all the time. However there was one major problem, our nearest neighbors and biggest international trade partners decided it was too hard for them to convert to Metric so they backed out. That left Canada in the lurch, we could no longer longer convert over to Metric, completely. So what happened is we got stuck in with the perpetual headache of having to convert back and forth on a daily basis because the US failed to get with the program. They are in fact the only country that couldn't!
I love bushels of apples and pecks of berries. 5 gallon bottles of water is so much nicer that 18 liters. My feet measure distance nicely. Easy peavey to measure stacks by multiplying fractions: 3/2'x 16'x5' for 18 " lengths, 4/3 x16 x 5 for 16" lengths. Quarts USED to be fun: 4 cups in the US 5 in Canada, which makes baking adventurous : until we went to liters. We measure distance in kilometers, not miles, but buy gas in liters and are given mileage of cars in liters/100 KM, rather than miles/liter Don't even talk about liters of gas: $1.24 /liter? As in $4.40 a gallon. I like my acreage, and don't want hectarage, if that word even exists. I don't want to cut my pies into tenths. A slice of pie is 1/8 of a pie. If there are nine people at the table, I want two pies. My dog is 42 pounds. He's no sissy 19 Kg. 225 grms of wool? Really? Cold cuts and cheese at $3.00 per 100 grms? Just tell me you want $13.50 a pound. It's four miles around the square, three miles to Portland, and 23 to Smiths Falls, 45 to the Thousands Islands Bridge, 70 miles to Ottawa, 380 to Westchester and 400 to NYC. 1250 miles from NYC to Sarasota, 3000 miles to the West Coast. So, go ahead and use the metric system. Just don't take my heritage away from me.
