Pat Naughtin wrote on 2002-07-02 23:40 UTC: > 2 The radian is not a suitable unit for popular or common use
This depends on the field of application. I agree that the rad is unpleasant for common construction angles sich as 90� or 45�. On the other hand, we had for example in the XFree86 group (the people who maintain the windowing software used under Linux) recently a discussion about the mess with font sizes, and there was some agreement that in screen display and projection applications, users are really more interested in visual angle rather than absolute character height. Here, the rad or better the millirad (mrad) is an excellent and highly convenient unit. 1�mrad is the visual size/angle under which you see a 1 mm large object at 1 m distance. The font I am currently using to type this text is 6 mrad large (3 mm capsize at 0.5 m viewing distance), which I find a very convenient unit. While I find the 360� circle perfectly convenient for large angles in constructuion, I wish that people would use the rad, mrad and �rad more often for visual angles, especially in optics and astronomy. I find arcseconds very unintuitive, whereas in order to know what a �rad is, I just have to think of a microchip bus line in a meter distance or a millimeter in a kilometer distance. Give the radian a chance, it is for small angles the most convenient unit (resolution of telescopes, aiming spread of guns, etc.). > > Marcus Markus (apparently another one, this one spells himself with k) -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
