Dr. Kelsey Hudson wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, J.A. Magallon wrote:
>
>>And different length for sea and land 'miles'. Very natural...
>>
>
> nautical miles are defined as 1852 meters, the exact length of one second
> of longitude at the equator :)
>
YM "minute" HTH.
FWIW, from the units database:
nauticalmile 1852 m # Supposed to be one minute of latitude at
# the equator. That value is about 1855 m.
# Early estimates of the earth's
circumference
# were a bit off. The value of 1852 m was
# made the international standard in 1929.
# The US did not accept this value until
# 1954. The UK switched in 1970.
Of course, the number 21600 is also such a nice round number.
-hpa
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 15 2002 - 21:00:24 EST