I'm on this USPS web page right now: http://ircalc.usps.gov/PopUps/PMI_SmallFlatRateBox_help.htm Hyphens, slashes, and quotation marks... I don't get it. To those whose native language is Imperialese, can anyone teach a Metrician like myself on what all those notations mean?
the " means inch. the hyphen seperates a whole number from the fraction. so that is 8.625 inches by 5.375 inches by 1.625 inches. pretty simple, if you see a single quote, that means a foot. so now you have the decimal dimensions, you should be able to convert it to metric easily if you have more questions go ahead an ask
Yes, in light of the above, it is simple, if a bit laborious due to the extra step (i.e. conversion from fractions to decimals). Thanks for that.
US has actually officially rejected metric in the aerospace industry, it was causing too many errors due to people being used to inches.
well usually with measurements like that people know how much it is, no one when giving US measurements says "6.25 inches" they'll say "six and a fourth inches", or say it's 3.6, they'' say 3 and three fifths. Conversion for you, normal for us
I kinda understand that, although for me using fractions to calculate things would be pure hell on earth.
If we are talking about the MARS stuff ? well the reason why one of those contraptions went kablooey was because it used two forms of emperial scale, the American and the British English emperial scale, that is what I have heard. So I personally think it is pretty stupid, if NASA has chosen the emperial scale. The metric scale is used worldwide , heck even Australia has begun using that scale. And I am tempted to say, it is one of the most universal scales of all things, cause it goes up in each other. millimetres, centimetres, decimetres, and so on and so forth. But as I said, that is my personal opinion.
So whatever happened to the US Metric movement? I remember going to school in the 70s and learning the metric system. We really should justs make the switch. People would get used to using grams/celsius/meters pretty quickly IMO.
When it comes to newtons, etc. It can get confusing, so that is why even current engineering books still use imperial units.
Also, the divisions are in powers of 2. 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/16 1/32 1/64th of an inch. Decimal is only used in tolerances and machine work. For normal junk like a box or a desk or such, it's usually down to the 1/8th or 1/16th.
