On Saturday 15 May 2010 19:00:52 Pat Naughtin wrote: > You might remind your professor of the contribution that two great > surveyors, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, made to the > initiation of the metric system as a legal entity in France in the > 1790s.
I probably did, but it doesn't help him think in metric. I've had this prof for a few years, and he's known all along that I think and measure in metric. One night we went out with two GPS units on poles, one adjustable and set to 1.8 m, the other fixed at 2.0 m. He didn't notice the difference, and started to set it to 1.8 m. I know my height is 1.5 m and noticed that the pole was taller than 300 mm above my head. He has insisted that the Rational Equation (for computing runoff of rainfall) is empirical because it uses a mishmash of units. It isn't. It is a mathematically-derived equation, and the mishmash of units he uses happens to give an answer 121/120 of the correct one, an error which the acre-foot-ists choose to ignore. I've gotten almost nowhere trying to explain the equation in metric. He's taught Manning's equation with a funny-looking constant in it, which is there only because he uses it with the wrong unit. (The constant is the 2/3 power of the number of feet in a meter.) Pierre -- When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates. Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.
