Hi. Its that lurker again.
In 1945, when I first started working at Convair (Then Consolidated
Aircraft) in the experimental department - where we hand built the first two
planes of each model, then tore them apart to make the production drawings,
we worked in Inches and Hundreths of an inch.
Mixed inches and decimal. It worked well.
Bill Eade
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Lentvorski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Main Discussion List for KPLUG" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, November 12, 2006 1:03 AM
Subject: Re: nice little historical summary of our weird units
Lan Barnes wrote:
A wonderful example of an otherwise intelligent person defending what
he's
used to.
That's a little strong. Defend? That's going to be pretty tough for a
guy who owns a mil-mm Vernier caliper.
I will point out that systems often have other concerns besides pure
computational efficiency.
For example, woodworking measurements don't seem to annoy me like
metalworking measurements. Woodworking fractions normally don't exceed
sixteenths and normally even that's a pipe dream due to moisture
expansion. Metalworking measurements often see sixty-fourths, and I start
grumbling that they should do it in mils or metric.
I would also point out that decimal arithmetic with more than a two digits
was actually more annoying than fractions until the advent of modern
calculators.
-a
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