Re: OT: Converting miles/km

Le 20/09/2024 à 09:00, Peter Moylan a écrit :

On 20/09/24 15:22, Hibou wrote:

>
I'm afraid I don't see the problem. Just assign 1.609344 to a memory
 cell. That's what I do. A shortened version is fine for mental
arithmetic - better than ln(5) - and if one has forgotten 1.6... but
has a calculator, what's wrong with tapping 2.54 x 12 x 5,280 /
100,000?

 That's all very well if you can remember that there are 5280 yards in a
mile.

<Cough>

I'm afraid that my school days are far behind me, and Ancient
History was one of my weakest subjects.
 I'm still just hanging on to the fact that an inch is about 25 mm, but
that's probably the magic number that's next to fade from my memory.
 I still remember that a mile is about 8/5 km, but it's unlikely that
I'll ever again visit a country that uses miles, so that too will soon
fall into the bin for useless facts.

SI is all very well for science, and BTUs and the like give me the heebies, I admit; but Imperial units - ounces, pounds, inches, feet, miles, are often well adapted to everyday life, and live on in a largish chunk of the world. The whole world (as far as I know) uses knots and nautical miles in the air, and on and under the sea. So, quite recent history, then.
Where Britain has gone wrong is in metricating half-heartedly. We drive for miles, and then fill up in litres - yet milk mostly comes in pints and quarts. Tables of clothing sizes are sometimes in inches and sometimes in centimetres (and probably inaccurate anyway). And so on.
We should be champions in mental arithmetic - though the evidence is that we're not.