Dear Martin,
The odometer had two decimal places. It was reading to an accuracy of
10 metres. To operate this feature my friend had to switch something
under the dash. He normally operated it with only one decimal place;
i.e. with an accuracy of 100 metres.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Heelong, Australia
On 2009/01/26, at 3:29 AM, Martin Vlietstra wrote:
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. J
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.
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(C) 931.212.0267
(H) 931.657.3107
(F) 931.657.3108
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
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