Here is some info on why the inch is _exactly_ 25.4 mm.
www.eng-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/pid/769/qid/12918
(scroll to the middle part)
It is thus a Swedish conspiracy (the French are innocent for once...)
Another piece for the metric aficionado: Engineers use mm, physicists use cm! The use of the prefixes centi, deci, hecto and deca is deprecated in most cases nowadays. The few exceptions are hectopascal (hPa) instead of millibar, and the decibel (dB), which is more practical than the bel.
In the mid eighties I saw something in a newspaper on "US is going metric inch by inch" that except for US, the only countries left with the non-metric units were Burma (aka Myanmar) and Brunei. All important high-tech nations...
Slashdot Mirror
Here is some info on why the inch is _exactly_ 25.4 mm. www.eng-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/pid/769/qid/12918
(scroll to the middle part)
It is thus a Swedish conspiracy (the French are innocent for once...)
Another piece for the metric aficionado: Engineers use mm, physicists use cm! The use of the prefixes centi, deci, hecto and deca is deprecated in most cases nowadays. The few exceptions are hectopascal (hPa) instead of millibar, and the decibel (dB), which is more practical than the bel.
In the mid eighties I saw something in a newspaper on "US is going metric inch by inch" that except for US, the only countries left with the non-metric units were Burma (aka Myanmar) and Brunei. All important high-tech nations...