Funny you should mention that Stan, I know a few coaches on the local high school teams that only just now switched to having their students run races in meters. Before that the coach would convert it to feet and have them run it and then they would be competing in meters.
I don't think that any distance should be in meters road sign wise unless it's "All" in meters and kilometers. Mixing meters and miles leads to some very dangerous problems with confusion about which unit is what and would in general slow down the metrication process. If and when road signs go metric in the US I'm sure what will probably happen is something similar to what did in Canada where they put decals over the signs on a particular holiday and then progressively replaced them as time went on. If we were smart we would be putting SI signs in the ground right next to the mile markers but that's not going to happen. That would take to much organization and planning for our government to accomplish and our local governments to be comfortable with. Mike On 2/18/07, STANLEY DOORE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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 > >
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