Dear Greg,
Your postings are being received on my machine somewhat strangely. I have
interspersed some notes.
on 2001-02-20 01.40, Gregory Peterson at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> The hectare is used regularly in Canada to express the area of forested land
> (used by paper and lumber companies, forest fire sizes, etc.), whereas the
> acre is still exclusively used to express the area of farm land, commercial
> property, and residential property. (aside: What is it about small and medium
> sized businesses that make them so opposed to metric??)
>
> I would prefer to hear anything over 100 ha expressed in square kilometres and
> anything less than 1 ha expressed in square metres. But I'm definately _not_
I can only see underlines when I think you meant quotation marks either side
of the word 'not'.
> going to correct anybody who chooses to use hectares rather than acres,
> sections, square miles, townships, square yards, or square feet.
>
> I suspect the continued use of expressions of thousands or millions of
> hectares is a carry-over from the Imperial days when one had to divide acres
> by 640 to get square miles... overly complicated arithmatic to get a quick
> mental value. Few realize that there are 100 ha in a km² and 10'000 m² in a
> ha.
In this paragraph, the symbols for square kilometres and for square metres
arrived here as a double curly quotation mark. Maybe it would be better to
use the alternate international standards km2 and m2.
BTW do you know if it is good SI practice to use an SI symbol as part of a
sentence as you have here as 'in a ha'. I have always written the unit name
in full under these circumstances and reserved the unit symbol to use in
conjunction with a number. However, I have no idea why I do this and I can't
supply a reference.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia
