The comments below show why distances up to about a mile should be in
metres.
A quarter mile is 440 yards or 400 m, half mile is 880 yards or 800 m; 3/4
mile is 1200 m and a mile is 1600 m. You should remember this from track.
Stan Doore
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pierre Abbat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 12:14 AM
Subject: [USMA:37992] Re: mm vs. cm
On Saturday 17 February 2007 15:43, Michael Payne wrote:
I vote for the comma, it's more easily seen than the dot, (.5 or ,5)
There
is a sign in Aspen that says Terminal .2 miles and I was telling someone
one day that it was more like 200 meters then he pointed out it was
actually point 2 miles, I'd missed the point every time I saw the sign
for
a couple of years!
That's why a zero should be written before the point. If you miss a dot
in "0.5", you see "0 5", which wouldn't be written for 5, so it has to be
0.5.
I grew up with both dots and commas for the decimal point (my father came
from
France, where they use the comma). For numbers in isolation, either
convention makes sense to me. But when you have lists of numbers, the only
way that looks right is to use dots for the decimal point and commas
between
the numbers (not at the thousands).
phma
