Pat Naughtin in USMA 21363 wrote: >As I've pointed out previously I believe that this is largely a mindset >issue. You were brought up in Brazil where metric units have been normal for >so long that the 'hundreds' of the original metric system are still the >major mindset. On the other hand I was introduced to SI in Australia in the >mid 20th century by which time such people as builders, engineers, >architects, and many others had come to the realisation that, not only did >division by 1000s make their work easier, it also made training and >conversion from old metric systems much simpler. As an example of this >simplicity let me list a complete set of units for building a house in >Australia. > >1000 mm = 1 m >1000 m = 1 km > >1000 mL = 1 L >1000 L = 1 m^3 > >1000 g = 1 kg >1000 kg = 1 t > >1 m x 1 m = 1 m^2 > >As a challenge, you might compare this with the set of units needed to build >a house in Brasil or Canada.
House building in Canada is unreformed. House builders generally suffer from lack of education. Commercial buildings are built by architects and engineers who have had university education. They use millimetres for buildings and metres for civil engineering. >I will now make some remarks about your arguments in favor of gons as a unit >of angle. I have interspersed some thoughts. >I don't know the history of the word gon, but grads and grades (like >degrees) are products of the late 18th century where they were common words >to refer to parts of larger units. In this context I suspect that the word >grad is simply a short term for gradation that only later became a slang >term. Grads and grades of plane angle were simply the marks that divided up >a quadrant into a hundred parts. Grade or grad comes from Latin "gradus", meaning a pace or step. Gon comes Greek and appears in such words as pentagon, octagon, etc. Joseph B.Reid 17 Glebe Road West Toronto M5P 1C8 Tel. 416 486-6071
