Pat, Yes, that was a nice example you gave and that kind of thing gave rise to people who wanted change, like Simon Stevin and John Napier, who stood up a few hundred years before decimal money and the metric system made their debut.
I got a remark from another list member about the 16 km^1. Although the length of our storaged archives looks like hidden ifp trash, it is not. Of course, the BWMA would love it if the archives in continental Europe and other metric countries used yards and miles as standard units. Too bad for them, no way. These 16 km^1 are purely co-incidental. Soon we will take over the archives of Dutch Roman Catholicism, 9 linear km, that will increase our storage to 25 linear km. As I cannot use superscript in Outlook Express I have written the symbol of linear km as km^1. The cities of Arnhem and Nijmegen are planning to build a very large storage room for public records and archives on a location between both cities. Best greetings, Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "Pat Naughtin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, 2003-10-09 10:27 Subject: [USMA:27143] Re: Curiosity from the archives on 2003-10-09 03.15, Han Maenen at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: <snip> > Many financial calculations were made in Roman numerals and the money was not decimal as well. Present day archivists and researchers get in trouble with this stuff and have to master Roman numerals and non-decimal > calculations. Dear Han, It makes you realise the genius of Simon Stevin, when you consider his physical and intellectual surroundings. I can remember one of his papers bemoaning the severity of calculating something like, 'What is the result of investing 324 pounds, 12 shillings, and 4 pence ha'penny for 17 years 8 months and a week at 3 7/8 per cent?', when all calculations were done in Roman numerals. As I remember it the answer had a whole number with a 13 numeral numerator above a 17 numeral denominator. I didn't check his calculations for accuracy � I took Simon's word for it! However, I did think at the time that many hundreds of intellectually gifted people must have been employed on these terribly pointless tasks. It's no wonder that Simon Stevin was so delighted when he developed decimal numbers and decimal calculations in 1585. Cheers, Pat Naughtin LCAMS Geelong, Australia Pat Naughtin is the editor of the free online newsletter, 'Metrication matters'. You can subscribe by sending an email containing the words subscribe Metrication matters to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
