Okay, just to clarify, for any Slashdotters visiting:
YES, I (Dan Birchall) really did submit the Slashdot piece. However, I presumed that Slashdotters would click on all the links
therein (thus slashdotting all the linked sites, as usual) and didn't specify
that oh, yeah, ONE of those links went to a page
(this one) containing lots more information. In retrospect, perhaps I
should have simply included the HTML of this page in my post, and I have
done that in a comment.
No, there is no prize for having clicked on this link...
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
- 38 inches according to a page at Arkansas State University and another at Microflex Technologies.
- 38.16 inches according to a rounding-happy math teacher at Norfolk Collegiate School in Virginia.
- 38.37 inches according to Honeywell's Sensotec folks.
- 38.8 inches according to some numerological babble
- 39 inches according to Fife Products and some folks who sell quilting products.
- 39.14 inches according to the specifications on a measuring wheel for engineers. (uh-oh!)
- 39.15 inches according to an October 30 2002 entry in a blog.
- 39.21 inches according to Richard Bowles.
- 39.27 inches according to pages at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
- 39.28 inches according to Jonathan Brooks at Penn State University.
- 39.3 inches according to some laser folks.
- 39.34 inches according to a page about photography, and another about a role-playing game. Hey, it's only a game, their meters can be whatever length they want.
- 39.36 inches according to some ham radio sorts and some NASA folks among others. Pretty close... but... shouldn't NASA know better by now?
- 39.38 inches according to people who race 1-meter model yachts, talk about prehistory in California, and, um, other NASA folks. Again, pretty close!
- 39.39 inches according to someone ranting against metric (how ironic), as well as a page about UFOs.
- 39.4 inches according to a list of conversions from a company that makes electric motors and such things, and the Secretary of the Navy.
- 39.45 inches according to a set of math problems from a university in the Philippines.
- 39.5 inches according to a space.com article on liquid lenses.
- 39.54 inches according to Mark Moburg in this mailing list archive.
- 39.6 inches according to a page about magnetic therapy.
- 39.7 inches according to pages from Des Moines Area Community College and some rounding-happy laser people.
- 39.77 inches according to a page about carpet-weaving in Turkey and another site that sells S-Video Cables and lots of other cables. (See, I wasn't alone!)
- 39.79 inches according to InterlinkBT (now Turck)'s information on DeviceNet Pre-molded Fieldbus cables (below table).
- 39.87 inches, according to a textfile compiling handy (if wrong) conversions for common weights and measures, from O'Reilly.
- 39.97 inches, according to the Science Glossary developed by teachers in the Poughkeepsie (New York) City School District for the 2001-2002 school year, and according to the zoning laws on satellite dishes in Springfield Township, Ohio.
- 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Once again, the correct answer is right around 39.37 inches. Remember that - it'll be on the quiz!
(From Our Friend, the Meter, June 21, 2004, by Dan Birchall.
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