NavList:

This refers to Red's recent posting on the subject of units and area,
in which he wrote-

| ...Which is why
| metric will never be really popular here, you folks are always
counting huge
| numbers with tiny measures and no one seems to remember the
decimeter exists.
| (Even then, two feet still seems like a more basic concept than "six
|decimeters".)
.

It ill becomes an American, from the last bastion of the inch and the
pound and the (US) gallon, to lecture "you folks" (by which,
presumably, he means the rest of the World) about the illogicality of
their measurement systems. Though I agree with him about the under-use
of the decimetre.

When he writes-

| "Two thirds of a meter square" would seem to be the best way to
phrase it in
| metric, to ensure the information isn't misunderstood.

he has devised his own way of expressing the area of a square hole 60
cm across, which is indeed CERTAIN to be misunderstood. If Gipsy Moth
IV had suffered a similar puncture on the other side of the hull, how
would he have expressed the total area of the two, I wonder?

When I wrote-

| "I have since learned that the hole was actually more like 60 cm x
60
| cm, that is, 3600 cm-squared,"

the hyphen, between cm and squared, was important, and makes the
meaning quite unambiguous.

| In the US we would call that 3600 square centimeters, not
"cm-squared". To me a
| 60cm squared hole translates perfectly into a hole 60 cm x 60 cm,
that is, 60
| squared, which is 3600. Square centimaters.

I agree with most of that, but in referring to "a 60 cm squared hole",
without the hyphen, Red has introduced an ambiguity that was absent
before.

I, too, would call it square centimetres. The way it had been worded
in the magazine, which I carefully spelled out (but Red didn't quote)
was quite unambiguous, though actually wrong, as follows-

| 'The 60 cm-squared hole in Gypsy Moth's beam is repairable. ..", in
| which cm-squared was actually written with a superscript of 2, after
| cm.

As it couldn't be written in that notation in an email, it was
translated, precisely, into cm-squared. That was an exact and
unambiguous equivalent of what had been written. Unfortunately, what
had been written in the journal appears to have been wrong (as I had
though might be a possibility). That was what I was putting right.

I hope others have understood, if not Red.

George.

contact George Huxtable at george@huxtable.u-net.com
or at +44 1865 820222 (from UK, 01865 820222)
or at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK.


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