Was that a navigation error to run aground? But you can, Orin; just run your car/boat aground and leave it sitting there.orin stepanek wrote:25 years on a tank full of fuel===pretty impressive. Wish I got that kind of mileage
The navigator was "three sheets to the wind."orin stepanek wrote:Was that a navigation error to run aground?
Great Britain abandoned English units fifty years ago.rstevenson wrote:
They probably became confused while converting from King Henry's feet to some French guy's meter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_%28unit%29 wrote:
<<The foot as a unit of measure was used in most Western cultures and was usually divided into 12 or sometimes 10 inches/thumbs, or into 16 fingers/digits. The first known standard foot measure was from Sumer, where a definition is given in a statue of Gudea of Lagash from around 2575 BC. Some metrologists speculate that the imperial foot was adapted from an Egyptian measure adapted by the Greeks (the ποῦς or pous of between 296 mm and 330 mm) which subsequently became a more consistent measure (the pes of 296 mm) under the Romans.
The popular belief is that the original standard was the length of a man's foot. In rural regions and without calibrated rulers, many units of measurement were in fact based on the length of some part of body of the person measuring (or for example the area that could be ploughed in a day). In that sense, the human foot was no doubt the origin of the measuring unit called a "foot" and was also for a long time the definition of its length. To prevent discord and enable trade, many towns decided on a standard length and displayed this publicly. In order to enable simultaneous use of the different units of length based on different parts of the human body and other "natural" units of length, the different units were redefined as multiples of each other, whereby their lengths no longer corresponded to the original "natural" standards. This process of national standardization began in Scotland in 1150 and in England in 1303, where many different regional standards had existed long before.
Some believe that the original measurement of the English foot was from King Henry I (c. 1068/1069 – 1 December 1135), who had a foot 12 inches long; he wished to standardize the unit of measurement in England. Though there are records of the word "foot" being used approximately 70 years before his birth, it is supposed that this old standard was redefined ("calibrated") according to Henry's foot. In fact, there is evidence that this sort of process was common before standardization. A new, important ruler could try to impose a new standard for an existing unit, but it is unlikely that any king's foot was ever as long as the modern unit of measurement. Approximately 99.6% of British men have a foot that is less than 12 inches long. One attempt to "explain" the "missing" inches is that the measure did not refer to a naked foot, but to the length of footwear, which could theoretically add an inch or two to the naked foot's length. This is consistent with the measure being convenient for practical uses such as building sites. People almost always pace out lengths while wearing shoes or boots, rather than removing them and pacing barefoot.
Henry I "three sheets to the wind"
There are however historical records of definitions of the inch based on the width (not length) of a man's thumb that are very precise for the standards of the time. One of these was based on an average calculated using three men of different size, thereby enabling surprising accuracy and uniformity throughout a country even without calibrated rulers. It therefore seems likely that at least since about the Twelfth century, the precise length of a foot was in fact based on the inch, not the other way around. Since this length was fairly close to the size of most feet, at least in shoes, this enabled the above-mentioned use of one's shoes in approximating lengths without measuring devices. This sort of imprecise measuring excessively multiplied the measuring error due to repeated use of a short "ruler" (the foot) was never used in surveying and in constructing more complicated buildings.
Effective July 1, 1959 the length of the international yard in the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations was defined as 0.9144 meters. Consequently, the international foot is defined to be equal to 0.3048 meters (equivalent to 304.8 millimeters). This was 2 ppm shorter than the previous U.S definition and 1.7 ppm longer than the previous British definition.
The international standard symbol for a foot is "ft" (see ISO 31-1, Annex A). In some cases, the foot is denoted by a prime, which is often approximated by an apostrophe, and the inch by a double prime; for example, 2 feet 4 inches is sometimes denoted as 2′−4″, 2′ 4″ or 2′4″. This use can cause confusion, because the prime and double prime are also international standard symbols for arcminutes and arcseconds.
By the time the international foot was defined in 1959, there was already a huge amount of survey data which had been collected based on the former definitions, especially in the United States and in India. The small difference between survey and international feet would not be detectable on a survey of a small parcel, but becomes significant for mapping, or when a state plane coordinate system is used, because the origin of the system may be hundreds of miles from the point of interest. Hence the previous definitions continued in use for surveying in these two countries for many years, and are denoted survey feet to distinguish them from the international foot. The United Kingdom was unaffected by this problem, as the retriangulation of Great Britain (1936–62) was done in meters.
The United States survey foot is defined as exactly 1200⁄3937 meters, approximately 0.3048006 m. In 1986 the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) released the North American Datum of 1983, which underlies the state plane coordinate systems and is entirely defined in meters. An NGS policy from 1991 has this to say about the units used with the new datum to define the SPCS 83:
- In preparation for the adjustment of the North American Datum of 1983, 31 states enacted legislation for the State Plane Coordinate System of 1983 (SPCS 83). All states defined SPCS 83 with metric parameters. Within the legislation, the U.S. Survey Foot was specified in 11 states and the International Foot was specified in 6 states. In all other states the meter is the only referenced unit of measure in the SPCS 83 legislation. The remaining 19 states do not yet have any legislation concerning SPCS 83.>>
True, and Canada switched then too. But what countries do in statute and what human beans do in their daily lives can differ widely. For example, I use kilometers and kilometers per hour when driving, but feet and inches when building things. I long ago switched to Centigrade for contemplating outdoor temperatures, but still in the house use an old thermostat which shows some other weird form of temperature measurement. I know what to wear when I go out and it's 12 degrees, and what to do about it if it's 60 degrees inside. I suspect most people use such mixtures without giving it much thought (unless they're piloting a nuclear sub and run it aground.)neufer wrote:Great Britain abandoned English units fifty years ago.rstevenson wrote: They probably became confused while converting from King Henry's feet to some French guy's meter.
(It's just U.S., Burma, & Liberia now.)
I like giving my weight in stone; it doesn't sound quite so bad.rstevenson wrote:neufer wrote:rstevenson wrote: I use kilometers and kilometers per hour when driving, but feet and inches when building things. I long ago switched to Centigrade for contemplating outdoor temperatures, but still in the house use an old thermostat which shows some other weird form of temperature measurement. I know what to wear when I go out and it's 12 degrees, and what to do about it if it's 60 degrees inside. I suspect most people use such mixtures without giving it much thought (unless they're piloting a nuclear sub and run it aground.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_%28mass%29 wrote:
<<The stone is a unit of measure, abbreviation st which, when it ceased to be legal for trade in United Kingdom in 1985, was defined in British legislation as being a weight equal to 14 avoirdupois pounds. It was also formerly used in several Commonwealth countries. Eight stones make a hundredweight in the Imperial system. Given its imprecise definition, it is arguable whether one should use kilograms (a mass) or newtons (a weight/force) as the equivalent SI unit.
The stone was originally used for weighing agricultural commodities. Historically the number of pounds in a stone varied by commodity, and was not the same in all times and places even for one commodity. Potatoes, for example, were traditionally sold in stone and half-stone (14-pound and 7-pound) quantities but the OED contains examples including:
Another example is the definition of the "stone" in the 1772 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica which reads, "STONE also denotes a certain quantity or weight of some commodities. A stone of beef, in London, is the quantity of eight pounds; in Hertfordshire, twelve pounds; in Scotland sixteen pounds".Code: Select all
Commodity Number of Pounds ------------------------------------------------- Wool 14, 15, 24 Wax 12 Sugar and spice 8 Beef and Mutton 8
Although the United Kingdom's 1985 Weights and Measures Act expressly prohibited the use of the stone as a unit of measure for purposes of trade (other than as a supplementary unit), the stone remains widely used within the United Kingdom and also in Ireland as a means of expressing human body weight. People in these countries normally describe themselves as weighing, for example, "11 stone 4" (11 stones and 4 pounds), rather than "72 kilograms" in most other countries, or "158 pounds" (the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the United States and Canada).
Its widespread colloquial use may be compared to the persistence in the United Kingdom and in Ireland of other Imperial units like the foot, the inch, yard and the mile, despite these having been supplanted entirely or partly by metric units in official use and other contexts. Thus on a National Health Service Web site the user may select imperial units, but the law requires that if this information is officially recorded, then such records shall be in metric units.
When used as the unit of measurement, the plural form of stone is correctly stone (as in, "11 stone"), though stones is sometimes used, but not usually by British natives. When describing the units, the correct plural is stones (as in, "Please enter your weight in stones and pounds").
In many sports such as professional boxing, wrestling and horse racing, stone is still used as a means of measuring weight.>>
Or landing a Polar Lander on Marsrstevenson wrote:neufer wrote:rstevenson wrote: I use kilometers and kilometers per hour when driving, but feet and inches when building things. I long ago switched to Centigrade for contemplating outdoor temperatures, but still in the house use an old thermostat which shows some other weird form of temperature measurement. I know what to wear when I go out and it's 12 degrees, and what to do about it if it's 60 degrees inside. I suspect most people use such mixtures without giving it much thought (unless they're piloting a nuclear sub and run it aground.)
I remembered the metric mishap. Glad it's still on the web. We need reminding of such things. What ever happened to one for all and all for one. Is it something to do with Mandlebrot's influence? 
