🚀 go-pugleaf

ag129@cus.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant) writes:

>1 SI inch is 2.54mm _exactly_, not just to 7 decimal places.
>But the people who don't use ISO paper sizes don't use SI inches
>either, they use NIST inches, which differ from SI inches well before
>the 8th decimal place.  (I don't know the exact details - after all,
>why should I know about American internal standards?)

>Does the persistence of the NIST inch have anything to do with the
>US public's huge stock of old guns needing new ammo machined to low
>tolerances?  Britain had no problems redefining its Imperial measures
>as SI multiples...  I wonder.

The story I heard related to land title.

The whole of the contiguous United States has been surveyed from a
baseline on the East Coast. Changing the value of the inch even
slightly would create major hassles for landowners on the West Coast,
since land boundaries are defined by reference to survey points.

Does anyone from the US know anything about this?

Sean Case
--
Sean Case               gsc@coombs.anu.edu.au
"[...] if a poststructuralist doesn't get you,
 a deconstructionist will."--Ursula K. LeGuin