Pat
Two decimal places on its odometer? I have never seen that before, though I have seen may odometers with one decimal place. OK, pieces of land in the Aussie outback are big and I would happily accept that you meant two significant figures. :-) Regards Martin _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Pat Naughtin Sent: 24 January 2009 20:30 To: U.S. Metric Association Cc: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:42468] Re: An Associated Press article in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution 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 their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com <http://www.metricationmatters.com/> for more metrication information, contact Pat at [email protected] or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter to subscribe.
