Sujet : Re: OT: Converting miles/km
De : vpaereru-unmonitored (at) *nospam* yahoo.com.invalid (Hibou)
Groupes : sci.lang alt.usage.englishDate : 20. Sep 2024, 07:22:28
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Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <vcj0qk$v2se$1@dont-email.me>
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Le 20/09/2024 à 00:12, Christian Weisgerber a écrit :
>
I'm sorry, I don't know where to post this. I'm crossposting to
alt.usage.english, because statute miles as a unit mostly afflict
the English-speaking world.
Afflict? Sometimes I wonder how many more times I'm going to hear Germans criticising how we do things.
So you want to convert between miles and kilometers. The conversion
factor is... uh... A 40-year-old calculator book provides a useful
tip: Unless you're designing a space probe, you can use ln(5).
WHAT?
Yes, the natural logrithm of 5 approximates the conversion factor
between miles and kilometers; specifically one mile is about ln(5)
kilometers. It's accurate to four digits.
If nothing else, it's faster to type on a calculator.
I think that's hysterical.
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?
Simples!