Dear Jim,
A year or two ago (and I think that I reported it here at that time) a
friend asked me how he could check the size of a piece of rural land
that his daughter wanted to buy. As he had a fairly new car, I asked
if it had the facility to measure kilometres and to use two decimal
places on its odometer. It did, so we drove to one corner of this
fairly rectangular property, set the odometer to read zero, drove
along one fence line, and noted the distance. We did the same for
another side of the property and then multiplied to find the area that
we reported as hectares.
I recall that the selling agent had described the property in his
advertising (using acres) as about 30 % larger that it was in reality.
Knowing the ture area gave my friend's daughter considerable
negotiating leverage.
On the issue of your school's parking lot, I have often thought (but I
have not done this yet) that a hectare marked out as a square on a
school property could be a useful educational asset. Other than seeing
its size, to run around it is 400 metres, along one side is 100
metres, its diagonals should both be 141.421 for budding Pythagoreans
to measure to the nearest millimetre. You mat remember that I wrote
about this in a one-page article called A metric playground at http://www.metricationmatters.com/docs/MetricPlayground.pdf
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Geelong, Australia
On 2009/01/25, at 6:31 AM, James Frysinger wrote:
Well, I know that my farm is 100 ha in area. That's a square
kilometer. I've used this figure and have discussed hectares in my
weekly columns in the local newspaper of record (The Mountain
View).* As I recall, we determined that the high school parking lot
was 0.5 ha in size. So, I would hope that many of the residents of
Van Buren County TN are at least slightly conversant with hectares.
We live east of McMinnville TN (which is in Warren County). On the
west side of McMinnville is a community called Morrison. In Morrison
is an automotive parts supplier called Yorozu Automotive Tennessee.
Their web page gives the size of their land area and their building
in square meters only. Knowing how many square meters are in a
hectare, I can easily see that their land area is just under 25 ha,
or about one-fourth of the size of my farm.
http://www.yorozu-corp.co.jp/en/point/yat.htm
Jim
* I'm taking a temporary break in the writing of this column.
Jeremiah MacGregor wrote:
Norman,
Who in the US would know what 2500 hectares is? I don't even know
what 6180 acres is. I would prefer it if they used square miles or
kilos. Jerry
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Norman & Nancy Werling <[email protected]>
*To:* U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, January 23, 2009 9:50:06 AM
*Subject:* [USMA:42415] An Associated Press article in today's
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
USMA list members,
Spanish energy company Acciona Energia will build a wind farm in
Mexico which will be the largest in Latin America.
The article was written by Mark Stevenson of Associated Press. It
states that the wind farm will be 6180 acres. When converted back
to hectares that would have been 2500 hectares. Don't you agree
that Mark Stevenson was required to convert those 2500 hectares to
6180 acres by the Associated Press, even had he wanted to report
using the metric measure?
Norm Werling
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
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