Lee:
Lee, you are certainly correct, but I can see you have never done any
surveying. No survey that I ever heard about had a boundary using
yards. If you check the Kentucky Department of State, you will find
that the first 30,000 surveys made in Kentucky used the measurement
of poles and chains for the boundaries.
Ten chains by ten chains equals damn near 10 acres, and is frequently
used as such. Actually:
1 Acre = 160 sq. Poles = 43,560 sq ft.= 9.97 sq chains.
640 Acres = 1 sq. Mile
1 sq C = 66 x 66 ft = 4356 sq ft
10 Chains x 10 Chains = approx 10 acres.
Just about 100 percent of the United States is laid out this way.
Incidentally, because the earth is curved, section lines needed to be
adjusted as the original surveyors moved north.
At Cincinnati, going East and West, it is only 47 nautical miles
between a degree, where as it is 60 nm at the equator. If you ever
fly into Runway 27 at Chicago O'Hare, look out the left window, and
you can see how some section lines were adjusted.
Neal Hammon
On Jan 45, 1120092007, at 3:31 PM, Lee Larson wrote:
On Jan 5, 2009, at 2:53 PM, Neal Hammon wrote:
So guess what, with 4.1666, you are back to fractions again, and so
using the metric system has not [sic] helped you one bit!
Few of us regularly navigate over any distance where we'd have to
worry about the miles/kilometers issue. Let's see how metric avoids
fractions in real world calculations.
Since a cubic centimeter of water has mass one gram and a liter is
1000 cubic centimeters, a liter of water is exactly one kilogram.
On the other hand, water weighs 62.37 pounds per cubic foot. A gallon
is 0.133680556 cubic feet (231.000001 cubic inches), so a gallon of
water weighs about 8.3376 pounds.
Of course, the purists will note that the kilogram is a unit of mass
while the pound is a unit of force, so comparing the two is like
Apples and Windows. To really compare properly away from sea level,
we must convert the English measurement to slugs. (How many people
have heard of the slug?) That gallon of water is about 0.259 slugs.
Now let's talk about farmers.
A farmer measures her square field as 100 meters on a side, or 10,000
square meters. This is a hectare, and it is how most of the world
measures farmland.
The American farmer measures her field as 69.5701 yards on each side
to get an acre. Let's hope she has a calculator!
_______________________________________________
The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will
be January 27 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane.
Posting address: MacGroup@erdos.math.louisville.edu
Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
_______________________________________________
The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will
be January 27 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane.
Posting address: MacGroup@erdos.math.louisville.edu
Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
