For me, the deciding factor is that the SI Brochure accepts the hectare and does not accept the dunam. Oh, and the dunam is a square an inconvenient, incoherent, irrational 31.622 776 601 683 795 m on a side.
--- On Sun, 3/18/12, Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> wrote: From: Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:51535] Re: Hectare To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, March 18, 2012, 12:09 AM On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 22:06:55 Paul Rittman wrote: > What do people on this mailing list think of the hectare? I looked up a few > posts that were several years old, and it appears that some were for, some > against. At first sight, it appeared to me a very convenient form of land > measurement, being about the area of two American football fields put > together (easy to visualize), and convenient for measuring the size of most > lots and estates. The other measurements, the square meter and square > kilometer, seemed to produce numbers that were too large or too small, > especially since Americans are used to evaluating the size of estates in > terms of fractions of an acre, or tens or hundreds of acres (and very > occasionally thousands and millions of acres). I prefer the dunam (el estrema, 1000 m²) to the hectare, because it agrees with the principle of powers of a thousand, and the hectare doesn't. But I much prefer the hectare to the acre. Sizes of countries significantly smaller than Egypt or Colombia (about 1 Mm² each) could be stated in megadunams. A square kilometer is 100 hectares, by the way. As to football fields, I don't watch football, so to me it's meaningless. Pierre -- .i toljundi do .ibabo mi'afra tu'a do .ibabo damba do .ibabo do jinga .icu'u la ma'atman.
