on 2005-05-30 07.00, Pierre Abbat at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On Sunday 29 May 2005 12:03, James R. Frysinger wrote: >> Surveyor's use the survey foot, which was just the plain ol' American foot >> before 1959. It equals (1200/3937) m and is about 2 mm/km longer than the >> "new" foot established here in 1959. Surveyors do not divide this foot into >> inches but instead measure down to the nearest hundredths of a foot. That >> is a resolution of about 3 mm. > > That's the precision of numbers on the map; but the accuracy of locating a > house in the field with a total station is 0.1 foot, or 30 mm. The new GPS > device which my boss bought to replace a damaged station has centimeter > accuracy (and this is one of the rare times I've heard him say anything in > metric), but locating a corner of a house is still, I think, going to be less > accurate than locating an iron. > > Back to my question: since surveyors already use decimals, does that mean that > they will be less confused by centimeters than clothing-makers are? > > phma
Dear Pierre, Jim, and All, I have revisited a short article on this that I wrote about this issue a year or so ago. If you are interested, I have posted it on my web site as a pdf file. You can retrieve it by going to:http://metricationmatters.com/articles and scrolling down to 'USA decimalisation and metrication'. Cheers, Pat Naughtin Geelong, Australia 61 3 5241 2008 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metricationmatters.com This email and its attachments are for the sole use of the addressee and may contain information that is confidential and/or legally privileged. This email and its attachments are subject to copyright and should not be partly or wholly reproduced without the consent of the copyright owner. Any unauthorised use of disclosure of this email or its attachments is prohibited. If you receive this email in error, please immediately delete it from your system and notify the sender by return email.
