A few weeks ago, I told my hydro prof that Metric Week was coming up and gave him some suggestions. They don't seem to have had much effect. Most of surveying makes equally good sense in feet or meters, so I didn't bother telling him. We have been doing combined factor calculations in meters, some of them with horizontal distances in feet and some with them in meters.
Sunday I was waiting for a bus and someone asked where Fulano Street was. I told him "It's three kilometers that way, just before Interstate Umptybleem. Keep going and you'll find it." He asked how much that was. I estimated it might take half an hour to get there. Tuesday we got back our hydro midterm. One problem was in metric. The prof doesn't understand, though, that densities in metric are given in kilograms, not newtons, per cubic meter (or per liter). The problem was to find the safety factors of a dam. Wednesday and Thursday were the surveying midterms. Several problems were entirely in metric. Tuesday and Thursday I found some bugs in Flowmaster, which we've been using in hydro. One is that if you change the units in a combobox which contains zero, the next time you try entering a number, it uses the wrong unit. The second was that it asks for the weight density, not the mass density, and has no blank for entering the gravity. The third was that the weight density of water, when divided by standard gravity, gives a number greater than 1 g/ml, thus unattainable by water at standard pressure. Today we baptized some people. We rent space from another church, and some people from the other church happened to be there. We put a portable baptistry on the stage. Someone in the other church was concerned that it may be too heavy. A guy in our church guessed that it would hold thirty gallons. I pulled out my measuring tape and with a quick calculation figured that it would hold 500 l when full, plus a bit (maybe 100 l) below the shelf inside. We filled it a bit over half full, and with the tape measure I figured it contained about 350 l when I turned it off. I suspect he confused gallons with cubic feet (he's from El Salvador and probably spoke in gallons because he thought that that's what the other guys thought in). Pierre
