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Conchan wondered: <<I was reading a report as I was preparing it for press
and I came across one sentence that makes no sense to me... "No
self-respecting scientist would mix English and metric systems.">>
"Self-respecting" is shorthand for a fairly complex concept. The short
version is that if you're professional, you wouldn't do something stupid
that would cause you to lose face and thus, stop respecting yourself.
Mixing measurement systems is the kind of error an amateur makes. Worse yet,
it can lead to disasters resulting from imprecise conversion; NASA lost one
of their Mars probes because different contractors used different
measurement systems, and the calculations were off by just enough to crash
the probe instead of landing it safely.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
telephone."--Bjarne Stroustrup (originator of C++ programming language)
