The 9.6 mm height on a LEGO may be so that when it is fitted to another
piece, slight gaps of 0.4 mm would give you a 10 mm height. This way, if
you assume the piece to be 10 mm and want to build something 1 m high, you
know that 100 pieces would be right on the nose.
You have to tell us more about this American church group and their
non-metric tapes. Did they actually expect to use them? Were they
surprised that materials didn't come in inches, nor were the metric sizes
convertible to round number of inches? Did they all buy metric tapes in the
local market and use them? Was the church built in modern metric or
obsolete non-metric units?
Dan
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pierre Abbat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, 2005-09-30 00:35
Subject: [USMA:34696] Re: FW: Don Can we email this question to All USMA
Members?
I don't have research, but I have my life experience. My father was
Jean-Pierre Abbat (you can look him up on Wikipedia). Being French and an
engineer, he thought in metric. I had lots of French books growing up, and
started learning French no later than 3, and I still speak it. If I went
to
France, they'd probably think I'm from Normandy (I definitely do not sound
Parisian). I also learned Spanish from my mother, and understand it fairly
well, but do not speak it fluently. (My father never learned Spanish, but
my
mother speaks French.)
My father also had various measuring tools: tape measures, durometer, etc.
At
an early age I learned that things are made in round metric sizes: a Lego
block is 8 mm wide. (It is 9.6 mm tall, but I didn't find that out until a
few months ago. The measuring tape didn't have a resolution that fine. I
also
learned binary early, so 96 is a round number to me.) Having been in
America
for many years before I was born, he had a thermocouple reading in
Fahrenheit
(to measure the grill), but I already thought that was odd. When I took
physics in high school and we measured ten meters in the classroom, hung
kilograms on the balance, and measured their weight in newtons, I went
completely metric.
Several years ago I went to Portugal to help construction of a church
building. I was the only one of 30 who brought a metric tape measure.
phma
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