Time for a changNow that the nights are closing in I’ve been spending time doing other stuff in the long and dark evenings. Like thinking about things.
One of the things that has been bouncing around my little brain is size. Well not particularly size per se, but the units of measurement used to specify size – length and height in particular.I’m thinking more of the units of measurement I use when describing a route that I’ve walked or cycled.
Should I use good old imperial feet and inches, or the new-fangled SI, metric system?
‘Imperial’ does sound rather superior though. On the other hand it’s much easier to calculate in units of 10 rather that 12, 25.4, 36, 1760 etc.
Kilometres fly by so much more quickly than miles – but there’s always more of them to cover. Ascent in metres is a whole different ball game when measured in feet. It’s a perception thing.
It’s a tough one.
These things are important. In 1999 NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because an outsourced engineering team used imperial units of measurement whilst the NASA team used the metric system for a particular spacecraft operation.
From the ever informative wired.com:
Mick suggested a few years ago that I convert my mind and my blog to metric units, but whilst UK road signs and thus (I presume) the minds of the majority of my readers work in imperial units, I'm inclined to stick with miles and feet (although i reserve the right to chop and change between imperial and metric at will, even within the same sentence...).
ReplyDeleteIt's difficult one and I really can't decide - each has it's attractions. I went out for a walk last night, taking my SatMap GPS and my Etrex20 GPS - one set to Imperial with t'other set to SI. The only conclusion I came to was that the SatMap isn't as good as the Etrex. But I knew that anyway.
ReplyDeleteJJ