I think what Pat is saying is use millimeters for technical drawings,
construction, manufacturing, etc. Because the millimeter, centimeter and
meter are easily interchangeable it's perfectly fine to use cm or m for
height or other personal things. But technically, if we use millimeters for
plans, there are no decimal places and the next multiple is the meter, then
the kilometer, etc. The NIST recommendation if I remember is to have a space
every 3 digits, so a boo can be 100 mm long, a house 18 000 mm long, a ship
400 000 mm long, a bridge 1 000 000 mm long. With practice we can easily
read this as 10 cm, 18 m, 400 m or 1000 m (1 km). I've come across problems
with tape measures that are in cm, after 100 cm they start at 1 again,
whereas it should be 101 or preferably 1010 mm. This might be on a 5 or 10 m
tape measure.
Mike Payne
----- Original Message -----
From: "David King" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, 11 May, 2006 17:46
Subject: [USMA:36763] RE: millimetres
I think that measuring height in mm could be seen as trying to be
over-precise.
I normally use centimetres, my own height being 178 cm. And I tend to
estimate peoples' heights in cm too, although some users of metric tend to
use metres (especially those from Europe), which can be confusing. A
friend of mine with a Latvian girlfriend said that she said her height was
"1 metre 70". He did not say 70 of what, and this tends to fit the
old-fashioned dual-measure approach of imperial, which we need to get away
from. I assumed he meant 70 cm, and when I saw her I knew that was it, and
not 70 mm.
Perhaps even we could measure heights in decimetres, when we need an
approximate height, e.g. 18 dm.
David King
Buy UKMA's report "A Very British Mess" ISBN 0750310146
http://www.ukma.org.uk/Docs/pubs.htm
Avoid confusion with conversion, just learn to think metric!
http://www.thinkmetric.org.uk
Nat Hager III wrote:
Attached is a handout I occasionally use...
Nat
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf
Of Bill Hooper
Sent: Thursday, 2006 May 11 10:00
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:36758] millimetres
Linda D. Bergeron wrote that she is experimenting with using millimetres
instead of centimetres. OK, I'll try it, too. Pat Naughtin's arguments to
do
this are persuasive. I'm not ready to outlaw centimetres but I'll try to
use
only millimetres (or metres) exclusively for a while and see how much I
can
become accustomed to it.
Here's my first effort (my signature below, one of several I use).
Bill Hooper
1810 mm tall
Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
