From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 11:37:45 EDT
Marco Cimarosti <marco dot cimarosti at essetre dot it> wrote:
> E.g., I never understood why on earth metres and yards should be kept
> different. In a public park somewhere in UK or Ireland I have seen the
> following sign:
>
> TOILETS ------->
> 50 yds (45.72 m)
Around the 1970s, it became fashionable for baseball stadiums to display
field dimensions on the outfield walls in meters as well as feet.
Unfortunately, they decided to be overly precise with the conversions,
and so you saw things like
330 ft
100.58 m
painted on the wall. This taught millions of young baseball fans that
the use of metric units requires carrying measurements out to 5
significant figures. (Of course, the original "330 feet" was not
necessarily exact to the nearest 0.01 foot.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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