"Billit" wrote in message
...

Could all my fellow allotment holders give me some idea how much they
are paying for there allotments I have ten rod plot and my rent for
2007/2008
was £60. 72 pence and a further increase of 25 pence per metre for the
year
2008 /2009.




--
Billit

Boston, Lincs. £17 for 300 sq meters. With mains water, no hosepipes (except
for filling water butts which are clearly shown to have water coming from
roofs into them)

Best regards

Chris

"Billit" wrote in message
...

Could all my fellow allotment holders give me some idea how much they
are paying for there allotments I have ten rod plot and my rent for
2007/2008
was £60. 72 pence and a further increase of 25 pence per metre for the
year
2008 /2009.




--
Billit

Boston, Lincs. £17 for 300 sq meters. With mains water, no hosepipes (except
for filling water butts which are clearly shown to have water coming from
roofs into them)

Best regards

Chris

Charlie Pridham wrote:

Thank Gawd for the metric system.

Doesn't work at sea though! chains, cables, fathams and nautical miles
all work exactly with the size of the earth, meters don't work at all
and
french ships have a much harder job of trying to navigate in metres
which
all has to be corrected and adjusted to fit :~)

Well, it all takes time to change to something more useful. Do you still
use quarto and foolscap paper, Charlie? No, you use A4, A5, and any of the
other metricised paper sizes.

If I remember correctly, the metre was defined as "one ten-millionth of the
length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one-fourth the polar
circumference of the earth)." That seems quite sensible to me. The fact that
"imperial" measurements are still used for air and sea travel is due to
history, international convention, and the danger involved in changing. But
it will happen someday (probably when computers rule all transportation, and
measurements become irrelevant).

In the meantime, I am happy to weigh a kilo of water when I can't find my
measuring jug, and know I have a litre (or vice-versa). Care to do the same
with imperial meaures?

--
Jeff
(cut "thetape" to reply)

Well nautical miles are metric and have nothing to do with fathoms. And metres should have been good, but got buggered by the perverse use of an old Babylonian measurement of angle, the degree, with 90 to the right angle. (360 was a significant number in the Babylonian base 60/base 6 system).

A metre was originally defined in Napoleonic times as 1 ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole (ie 10,000 km from pole to equator). In fact they were ever so slightly out, it's actually about 10,002 km, (or 40,007km around a circumference through the poles). And because the earth isn't perfectly spherical, it's 40,047km around the equator.

It is the bizarre fact of measuring 90 degrees to the right angle that makes the metre a bit annoying, 111.11km to the degree, for navigation purposes. Of course the French tried to make this all work by doing angular measure not in Babylonian degrees but metric grads, also called grades, gradians or gons, which have 100 to the right angle. But sadly they didn't catch on for most purposes. They also put the zero meridian through Paris, but that didn't catch on either.

Nothing imperial about nautical miles. A nautical mile is traditionally 1 minute of latitude. To the nearest metre 1 minute of latitude is 1852m. The nautical mile is today DEFINED as 1852 metres. That's 1012.6859 fathoms. The nautical mile was never 1000 fathoms. The old British Admiralty definition of a nautical mile was 6080 feet, which had the convenience of being precisely 800 feet more than a statute mile, but is clearly not an exact number of yards or fathoms, so it doesn't fit well in the imperial system either. The precise length of a foot varied over time until it was standardised in 1959 (via 1 inch = 25.4mm precisely), and this made the admiralty nautical mile about 1m longer than a modern metric nautical mile.

NASA lost a spacecraft around Mars because someone did some calculations in imperial measurements and got them wrong. I'll stick to metric, thank you.

5m is only about 0.5% different from a rod. So 25m2 is a pretty good equivalent for a square rod, and makes the sums a lot easier.

A hectare is a piece of land 100m by 100m, very easy to visualise. 10,000m2 to the hectare. 100 hectares to the square km, which are those squares on the map, useful for visualising larger areas. Whenever anyone quotes acres to me I immediately convert to hectares or sq km using the 2.5 acres to a hectare approximation.

In much of the continent, it is automatic to describe the floor space of a property in m2. So you can immediately tell what sort of a size property it is. I wish we would do the same.

Charlie Pridham writes
In article ,
says...

Thank Gawd for the metric system.

Metric has the brilliant property that lengths and volume measures 'fit'
with each other - eg 1ml of water is 1cc so 1 litre is 10cm x 10x m
x10cm, which is also 1kg, so 1 tonne = 1m cubed.

But it doesn't have useful sized measures - the inch is still good for
smallish things, and the foot is ideal for all sorts of things - much
easier to understand the difference between a 10ft square room and a
12ft square room than a 3.something m square room and a 3.something else
m square room.

Doesn't work at sea though! chains, cables, fathams and nautical miles
all work exactly with the size of the earth, meters don't work at all and
french ships have a much harder job of trying to navigate in metres which
all has to be corrected and adjusted to fit :~)

We tend to measure angles in degrees, but mathematicians measure in
radians (a one radian slice of cake has the property that the curved
edge is the same length as the two straight edges) and some scientists
do it in grads (100 grads to the right angle)
--
Kay

In article ,
says...
If I remember correctly, the metre was defined as "one ten-millionth of the
length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one-fourth the polar
circumference of the earth)." That seems quite sensible to me. The fact that
"imperial" measurements are still used for air and sea travel is due to
history, international convention, and the danger involved in changing. But
it will happen someday (probably when computers rule all transportation, and
measurements become irrelevant).

In the meantime, I am happy to weigh a kilo of water when I can't find my
measuring jug, and know I have a litre (or vice-versa). Care to do the same
with imperial meaures?

--
Jeff
(cut "thetape" to reply)


You miss the point, yes the meter was supposed to be 1 millionth of the
earths circumference (but they got it wrong so it is in fact a totally
arbitrary amount) and I use only metres at home. but a nautical mile is a
rotational measurement and is defined as the distance at the equator of
1' of longitude, and since there are 60 min in a degree and 60 sec in a
min you can see the advantage a of a distance that comes out at roughly
6000 feet! (the earth not being perfectly round it actually varies
depending on where you are) further more a fathom at 6 feet also neatly
divided but the hydrographic office quite sensibly changed depths on
charts over to meters back in the 1970's to avoid grounding accidents as
a lot of other countries use uk charts but they did not change the
distance scales and never will as latitude and longitude is the best way
of defining your position in an empty ocean
--
Charlie Pridham, Gardening in Cornwall
www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of national collections of Clematis viticella cultivars and
Lapageria rosea

Charlie Pridham wrote:
In article ,
says...
If I remember correctly, the metre was defined as "one ten-millionth
of the length of the earth's meridian along a quadrant (one-fourth
the polar circumference of the earth)." That seems quite sensible to
me. The fact that "imperial" measurements are still used for air and
sea travel is due to history, international convention, and the
danger involved in changing. But it will happen someday (probably
when computers rule all transportation, and measurements become
irrelevant).

In the meantime, I am happy to weigh a kilo of water when I can't
find my measuring jug, and know I have a litre (or vice-versa).
Care to do the same with imperial meaures?

--
Jeff
(cut "thetape" to reply)


You miss the point, yes the meter was supposed to be 1 millionth of
the earths circumference (but they got it wrong so it is in fact a
totally arbitrary amount) and I use only metres at home. but a
nautical mile is a rotational measurement and is defined as the
distance at the equator of 1' of longitude, and since there are 60
min in a degree and 60 sec in a min you can see the advantage a of a
distance that comes out at roughly 6000 feet! (the earth not being
perfectly round it actually varies depending on where you are)
further more a fathom at 6 feet also neatly divided but the
hydrographic office quite sensibly changed depths on charts over to
meters back in the 1970's to avoid grounding accidents as a lot of
other countries use uk charts but they did not change the distance
scales and never will as latitude and longitude is the best way of
defining your position in an empty ocean

Yes, they got the metre wrong, but that was a measurement fault, not a
design fault. It's not particularly different for the nautical mile, as you
noted (this from Wikipedia):

"The historical definition differs from the length-based standard in that a
minute of arc, and hence a nautical mile, is not a constant length at the
surface of the Earth but gradually lengthens with increasing distance from
the equator, as a corollary of the Earth's oblateness, whence the need for
"mean" in the preceding sentence. This length equals about 1,861 metres at
the poles and 1,843 metres at the Equator, a variation of one percent."

One percent; quite a variation. The original metre was out by about 0.5
mm - that's only 0.05%.

No argument about defining position in an open ocean, but it's not very
practical for trying to ascertain the distance between two points (you
wouldn't want to think about a rescue mission in terms of degrees of arc to
travel for a lifeboat or helicopter. 15.5 nautical miles (or the equivalent
in km) is more sensible).

And that is the whole point about the metric system; it is far easier to
use.

Mind you, it isn't that difficult to put the decimal point in the wrong
place ;-(

--
Jeff
(cut "thetape" to reply)

In article ,
says...

'Charlie Pridham[_2_ Wrote:
;773663']Doesn't work at sea though! chains, cables, fathams and
nautical miles
all work exactly with the size of the earth, meters don't work at all
and
french ships have a much harder job of trying to navigate in metres
which
all has to be corrected and adjusted to fit :~)
Well nautical miles are metric and have nothing to do with fathoms. And
metres should have been good, but got buggered by the perverse use of an
old Babylonian measurement of angle, the degree, with 90 to the right
angle. (360 was a significant number in the Babylonian base 60/base 6
system).

A metre was originally defined in Napoleonic times as 1 ten-millionth
of the distance from the equator to the pole (ie 10,000 km from pole to
equator). In fact they were ever so slightly out, it's actually about
10,002 km, (or 40,007km around a circumference through the poles). And
because the earth isn't perfectly spherical, it's 40,047km around the
equator.

It is the bizarre fact of measuring 90 degrees to the right angle that
makes the metre a bit annoying, 111.11km to the degree, for navigation
purposes. Of course the French tried to make this all work by doing
angular measure not in Babylonian degrees but metric grads, also called
grades, gradians or gons, which have 100 to the right angle. But sadly
they didn't catch on for most purposes. They also put the zero meridian
through Paris, but that didn't catch on either.

Nothing imperial about nautical miles. A nautical mile is traditionally
1 minute of latitude. To the nearest metre 1 minute of latitude is
1852m. The nautical mile is today DEFINED as 1852 metres. That's
1012.6859 fathoms. The nautical mile was never 1000 fathoms. The old
British Admiralty definition of a nautical mile was 6080 feet, which
had the convenience of being precisely 800 feet more than a statute
mile, but is clearly not an exact number of yards or fathoms, so it
doesn't fit well in the imperial system either. The precise length of a
foot varied over time until it was standardised in 1959 (via 1 inch =
25.4mm precisely), and this made the admiralty nautical mile about 1m
longer than a modern metric nautical mile.

NASA lost a spacecraft around Mars because someone did some
calculations in imperial measurements and got them wrong. I'll stick to
metric, thank you.

5m is only about 0.5% different from a rod. So 25m2 is a pretty good
equivalent for a square rod, and makes the sums a lot easier.

A hectare is a piece of land 100m by 100m, very easy to visualise.

I agree that imperial measures are a pain, and that a nautical mile has
more to do with an angle measurement than a distance, (and I am afraid
that we always used the scale of the chart ie degrees and mins for
distance and this was sub divided into cables and chains not meters) I
can not accept that because someone has said how many metres long a
nautical mile is it becomes metric! I was only trying to point out that
many apparently arcane old measures did have (and sometimes still do)
have a point.
Sometimes however even at sea we bowed to tradition and after working all
my cargo figures out carefully in Tonnes and meters cubed I would then
have to produce legal documents like Bills of lading showing such wonders
as US Barrels, and ships also have port dues etc levied on them based on
Gross tons and Nett tons neither of which have anything to do with
anything!!
Back to gardening, yesterday was a bit dissapointing down here all grey
gloom but at least dry, more of the same to day, hoping to get down as
far as bench level in my greenhouse today, amazing how many plants get
stuffed in there over winter.
--
Charlie Pridham, Gardening in Cornwall
www.roselandhouse.co.uk
Holders of national collections of Clematis viticella cultivars and
Lapageria rosea

Sacha wrote:

On 6/2/08 17:54, in article ,
"Martin" wrote:
Thank Gawd for the metric system.

But it's so bland, so boring. Thank God for Ye Olde English, if only
because it IS ours!

Exactly. These things are deeply embedded in language. You can't, for
example, talk about Our Hero two-point-five centimetering his way along
the crumbling ledge. It just doesn't have the same ring.

Then, what would we call a piece of artillery so massive it takes two
men to load the shell? Eighty-pounder! Not only the glorious pun on
'pound' but the subtle echo of weighty mass in 'eighty'. Weighty
pounder. Pure Poetry. By contrast, bringing up the thirty-six
kilogrammer sounds more millinery than military.

And it's not just the lexicon, there's the actual physical expression.
Yard! What a wide-open, full man's stride of a word, roared from the
chest. 'Metre' is such a meek and tweety sort of concoction. No wonder
even the French themselves shorten and flatten the e. I think they've
been planning this since Waterloo.

In article ,
brian mitchell writes:
| Sacha wrote:
| On 6/2/08 17:54, in article ,
| "Martin" wrote:
| Thank Gawd for the metric system.
|
| But it's so bland, so boring. Thank God for Ye Olde English, if only
| because it IS ours!
|
| Exactly. [ Accolades for Imperial measurements skipped. ]

But, as a mathematician, it taught children the ability to perform
mixed-base arithmetic - people of my generation and background have
little difficulty in converting between units, and I frequently use
mixed system quantities. So, actually, do many other people, though
some modernists get unhappy when you talk about kilogrammes per cubic
foot or use metres per second and miles per hour in the same sentence.

After all, we used to be required to do that sort of conversion in
our heads, and some of us still can. Not as fast as I used to be able
to, but senility and ethanol may have something to do with that ....


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

(Nick Maclaren) wrote:


In article ,
brian mitchell writes:
| Sacha wrote:
| On 6/2/08 17:54, in article ,
| "Martin" wrote:
| Thank Gawd for the metric system.
|
| But it's so bland, so boring. Thank God for Ye Olde English, if only
| because it IS ours!
|
| Exactly. [ Accolades for Imperial measurements skipped. ]

But, as a mathematician...

It may well be otherwise with mathematicians, but for most the soul
makes its nest among the crevices of language rather than numbers.

After all, we used to be required to do that sort of conversion in
our heads, and some of us still can. Not as fast as I used to be able
to, but senility and ethanol may have something to do with that ....

The extraordinary uses some people put their heads to!
All praise to ethanol, which is well known to lends wings to the flight
of poetic imagination but apparently also halts the onrush of numbers
:-)

In article ,
brian mitchell writes:
|
| But, as a mathematician...
|
| It may well be otherwise with mathematicians, but for most the soul
| makes its nest among the crevices of language rather than numbers.

It is, indeed, otherwise with mathematicians :-)

| After all, we used to be required to do that sort of conversion in
| our heads, and some of us still can. Not as fast as I used to be able
| to, but senility and ethanol may have something to do with that ....
|
| The extraordinary uses some people put their heads to!
| All praise to ethanol, which is well known to lends wings to the flight
| of poetic imagination but apparently also halts the onrush of numbers
| :-)

I tend to favour the approach that one should never plan your future
until one has discussed the plans once drunk and once sober ....


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

In article ,
Martin writes:
|
| Then again most people here didn't know what a rod or a rood was.
| There was somebody using a rod as a square measurement when a rod is a linear
| measurement.

From the OED:

A measure of length, equal to 5 yards or 16.5 feet;

A measure of area: A square perch or pole;

I had to learn such things, when I was a stripling.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

Zhang DaWei says...
On 8 Feb 2008 22:27:43 GMT, (Nick Maclaren) wrote:


In article ,
brian mitchell writes:
|
| But, as a mathematician...
|
| It may well be otherwise with mathematicians, but for most the soul
| makes its nest among the crevices of language rather than numbers.

It is, indeed, otherwise with mathematicians :-)


Along with the advantages of knowing about multi-base systems, I also
had the advantage (though it only became apparent as an advantage much
later) of doing (a) my A level in Applied Maths using the old Imperial
System, (b) My A level in Chemistry using the cgs system, and (c)
doing my Physics A level using the SI system of units.

It means I can easily swap and convert between them all now, as well
as appreciating some wonderfully delicious puns based on Imperial
measurements, of which one I posted a day or so ago was one I first
heard well over 35 years ago.

Dawei


NASA could have done with your services before they got in
a muddle with units and stuffed that satellite into Mars at
high velocity :-)

I used to find Maths a chore as a student, but nowadays see
the beauty of it more. I see "mathematics" everywhere in
everything from nature to climate to flows of people along
a crowded street and traffic along a road. For example
there are so many visible mathematical parallels for
example between electrical theory and people and vehicle
movement etc, etc, etc. Life is dynamic mathematics. :-)
--
David in Normandy.

To e-mail you MUST include the password FROG on the
subject line or emails are automatically deleted.

Zhang DaWei says...
As a qualified and active Mathematical Psychologist since 1978, I
couldn't agree more with this. (A Mathematical Psychologist is someone
who uses the tools of mathematics to model and understand various
psychological processes, which include parts of social psychology, and
so on, which are present in the example you gave.)

Dawei

Fascinating isn't it. Lots of examples but another one I
like is the parallels between the distribution of charged
(repulsive) particles, and gas theory and strangers
boarding a bus. When the bus is empty they tend to spread
evenly along the bus maintaining a certain minimum distance
between them. As the bus fills the strangers are forced to
sit closer together, then finally share a seat. However at
high density people will still not sit on each others lap -
two particles will not share the same valency or energy
state.
--
David in Normandy.

To e-mail you MUST include the password FROG on the
subject line or emails are automatically deleted.