On 2008/03/14, at 7:26 AM, Bill Potts wrote:
I give my height as either 183 cm or 1.83 m. Like you, I would
never dream
of giving it in millimeters.
Bill
________________________________
Bill Potts
Dear Bill,
I live in the state of Victoria in Australia and I once had the task
of training members of the Victoria Police Force in the use of metric
units. This was in 1975 when we all had little experience with
measuring human height with metric units.
We tried all three methods that you mention: metres, centimetres, and
millimetres and in the end decided on two 'rules'. These were:
1 We will measure human height in metres.
2 We will round the heights to two decimal places that end with
either a '0' or a '5'.
The second rule arose because we found that centimetres were much too
precise for the sorts of 'guesstimations' that police have to do 'on
the trot'. A police officer who is chasing a fugitive in a dark lane
at night simply does not have the ability to guess within the width
of his little finger nail — to get within half the width of his fist
is quite good enough to inform others about the height of the fugitive.
I strongly recommend that you use metres only as the cost of using
centimetres in delaying your overall metric transition — one year
versus 100 years — is far too great.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
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