[Greenbuilding] Metric system in building

[Lance Collins]

Speireag said:

>      One of my grade school math teachers pointed out that the shaft
>of a parking meter was about a meter high.  He said that it always
>helped him picture things in meters, because he laid parking meters
>end-to-end.
>
>      Never worked for me, because they're actually more than a meter.
>But since I can picture a yard pretty well, at half a fathom, which
>is about my armspan, or almost exactly one of my paces, I can also
>picture a meter pretty well.

In terms of a mental image a metre and a yard are so close it's 
irrelevant.  (36 inches vs 39.5 inches)
(I'm struggling to see how to put a tape measure against these two 
possible images in my mind let alone Speireag's).<g>

People resist change so the more change resistant you are the better 
the system you grew up with.  Australia went metric when I was 25 (in 
1966?).  I found the change difficult until I decided to abandon 
conversions and just go with the new system.   Like learning a new 
language you need to think in the new language and not translate.

The Romans were keen on decimals.   Centurians,  decimations and so forth.
A Roman mile is 1000 paces.   Near enough to an Imperial mile when 
you know that a Roman pace is two steps or about five feet.

If you want to roughly measure a distance many of us try to take yard 
or metre steps.   For myself I get much better results by strolling 
normally (not stretching) so that each left foot down is five 
feet.   (Ten feet is very close to three metres).

When Australia converted most things were 'soft' converted so that 
there were some quite odd numbers on labels.  But now most things are 
straight metric ('hard' conversion).

Even with the metric system industry and common usage can 
conflict.  Everything in building is in millimetres (so no easily 
missed decimal points) but ordinary folk use centimetres.
And as you will have noticed we use the French spelling for 
metres.   And we still haven't agreed on pronunciation of 
kilometres.  (kill-OM-etres versus KILO-metres).

Lance
(in Aus)



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