Just back from a week's business in southern California, attending a technical society meeting and giving a talk myself. The meeting was SAMPE, Society for the Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering (www.sampe.org) which heavily involves aerospace and the use of composite materials in aerospace structures. Aerospace is heavily ifp, but a couple observations: The meeting was an odd mixture of SI and ifp. The submission guidelines specify SI, so printed proceedings were all SI, but a lot of the speakers managed to "cheat" and include ifp. One older NASA fellow spoke about fuel tank problems on the next-generation space shuttle, and his talk was entirely ifp. I just sighed, thinking he's probably been an engineer for 30-40 years and you're not going to change him. John kPa would be pleased about one thing: Kilopascals and megapascals appear to rule when it comes to pressure measurement. Some of the Boeing talks continued to use psi, ksi, and msi, but these seemed to be in the minority. Also, I spoke to one engineer from Boeing-Canada, who sounded confused when I described a sensor dimension in millimeters. When I slightly chided him for being from metric Canada, his response was somewhat regretful, saying "Yeah, but that's Boeing you know". With nanotechnology becoming the rage, I noticed a new expression for complaining about one's boss: describing him as "nano-managing" your work, as opposed to micro-managing. <g> Took an afternoon off and went up to LA (conference was in Long Beach). Walked around CalTech at Pasadena, since any physicist would appreciate seeing the classrooms where Richard Feynmann once taught. Saw an older yellow Volvo parked on the street with a "Go Metric" sticker on its bumper, and thought to take a picture but then thought, since I was ~10 km from Northridge, it might be a listmember who would post the picture if he wanted. Drove down Calif 1 past Huntington Beach, and noticed some old mile/km distance signs along the highway. Also, listening to the radio I noticed one metric quantity Californians are sure becoming familiar with these days: how many Megawatts power shortfall was likely for that day! Nat
