Buying wholeheartedly into everyday GPS use means having to suffer through understanding metric-speak.
I've gotten somewhat comfortable with the concepts of meters, or “commie yards” as a fellow surveyor, Dirty Roy, began calling them after his 1966 tour in Viet Nam. Roy would grouse “A meter’s just a commie yard and a klick (kilometer) is a commie mile and the damn commies can’t even get THAT straight ‘cause their $%#!$# commie yards are too long and their $%#!$# commie miles are too short".
What I take issue with is the expressions of decimals of a meter. Instead of universally using decimal places of a meter, like 0.01m (instead of 1cm) or 0.005m (instead of 5mm), centimeters and millimeters in GPS texts and conversations are tossed around and mixed up like confetti in a tickertape parade.
Like:
A. 1 mm accuracy
B. 10 mm
C. 160 cm accuracy
D. 0.49 cm shift
Comments
A. 1 mm is 0.001 meter, why not ".001m accuracy"?
B. 10 mm = 1 cm. Why not 1cm, since centimeters are used as frequently as millimeters or better yet .01 m (1 hundredth of a meter)?
C. This one really pi$$es me off. 160 cm is 1.60 meters. If your going to express 1.60 meters with something as silly as 160 cm, then why not call it 1600 mm or better yet 16 dm (decimeters) to further confound red blooded Americans who’ve done you no harm?
D. 0.49 cm! The commies got me on this one. They win. The final domino has fallen and the hammer and sickle flies over every state capital building of this once great land. I, for one, welcome our new communist overlords.
Commies 1, Mike and Dirty Roy 0.
0 decimeters that is
:good: Can I have an Amen?
Don
:good:
Actually that needs :good: :good:
Amen!
I think your friend should've called them French Yards, not Commie Yards.
And why in the heck are they 39" long? Why not a foot or a cubit or something reasonably natural like that?
Taken from wikipedia: Since 1983, meter is defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum in 1???299,792,458 of a second
So it appears there is a commie takeover to also make time metric.
:good: :'( :good:
Dave, I don't see Roy much since he retired but I know his reply would be along the lines "French?... Commie...? same-o same-o".
I had a co-worker who was a Flight Engineer on a Chinook in Vietnam. He liked to say "same-o, same-o" too.
He told me some wild stuff. He said early on some of the Chinooks shot themselves down. The door gun could shoot almost straight ahead and if they were turning they could turn into their own projectiles. He said they had to limit the travel of the door gun.
Then one time they landed at a Civilian airport. There is two jet fuels and the military and civilian give them different names plus are reversed. He put the wrong fuel in the helicopter so the Army had to remove the engines and send them back to the factory for overhaul.
dagnabit I've been using 1???299,792,457 of a second. Guess I will have to redo a bunch of work 🙁
We're in good company!
Three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Myanmar (Burma), Liberia, and the United States.
We do however use SI units for booze and drugs.
I'm trying to piece together the pedigree of the commie yard: They were trying for a half-second pendulum but they got their earth radius wrong?
I'm sticking with inches, feet, rods/poles/perches, varas, chains, furlongs, and miles.
if it's the wrong unit, it's still wrong no matter what you call its decimalizations! That's why nobody can decide which decimal form to use ... plus the tendency for people to think that something is better because it has more decimals ... point oh one meters is precise, but a centimeter is nothing special, and ten millimeters is way out of spec!