June 29, 2005
Did you know?
I've spent a lot of time recently arguing the merits of the standard English system of measurement over the metric system. One of the many things we are all taught growing up is that the metric system is simply better than the older system and the only reason we Americans haven't gone along with the rest of the world and adopted the metric system is that we're too lazy or stupid or stubborn. This is simply false. We use the old system for a very good reason, and that is because for the most part, it's more convenient (and because we were never conquered by the French armies and forced to change our ways). While nobody disputes the obvious utility of the metric system for scientific applications, few proponents of the metric system have really considered how, for example, a system in which temperatures in most of the populated earth range from -17 to 38 degrees is really any better the identical system scaled up to range from 0 to 100. True, it's hard to convert feet into miles, but when you're using feet, to measure, say, the size of a room, you don't need to convert them into miles. Feet are useful because they have the right amount of granularity to measure things like room sizes. Meters are clumsy for that kind of human-scale measurement. Acres are useful because they have the right amount of granularity to measure things like house plots. Of course, anything you can do with imperial units you can do with metric units, but for the most part, it's just less convenient, less human scale. At some point the metric people tried to divide the day into 20 hours of 100 minutes. It failed, because hours of 60 minutes are more convenient. You can divide them into 4 sections of 15 minutes, 3 sections of 20 minutes, 6 sections of 10 minutes, and so forth. And to a human, an hour is a very convenient period of time, more so than a longer, less divisible hour would have been.
This post isn't about that though. It's just to share something I didn't know until yesterday but found interesting. Sailors and pilots use the measurement of Nautical Miles for the same reason that we use Statute Miles: because it's simply more convenient. A nautical mile is about 1.2 Statute miles, but it also means something: it is 1 minute (1/60th of a degree) along a longitudinal section (or latitude, more or less, along the equator).
So let's say you wanted to calculate how far New York (lat about 40'30") is from the equator along the earth's surface. Well that would be 40 * 60 + 30 = 2430 nautical miles. If you wanted to figure out about how far New York was from, say, Madrid (same latitude), well, you'd just figure out how many degrees to go (-74 to -3 = 71), multiply by 60, adjust for the latitude (1-sin(40.5 in radians)), and you get 2766 nautical miles. That would be wrong because you'd never actually go straight across a latitude line.. but you get the point. Nautical miles make this stuff easy to calculate.
A knot, then, is one nautical mile per hour. Originally speed was measured in boats by dropping a knotted rope down and counting the number of knots that passed in a given amount of time. I don't sail, but I can see how this system of measurement -- latitude, longitude, nautical miles, and knots -- would be incredibly convenient for navigation on earth.
Posted by Dan at 05:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (7)
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