well that's one thing - but scales (we are talking about reference for
photography, aren't we?) are something else again -
        i mean if when i'm doing historical archaeology (which is my mainstay) i
could go over to the scientific collection downtown and compare "feet" and
"inches" as defined in leipzig or chemnitz or dresden at various periods in
time, and figure out which sets of measures were relevant to whatever problem i
had in hand -
        and maybe things like barleycorns and pecks and ells and furlongs and
all those weirdnesses out there (imperial or american gallon?) - when i worked
as a surveyor we had tapes marked in 1/10ths of a foot!!!
        but when i'm photographing something as permanent documentation, i want
the doku to be continue to to be useful no matter who might come along someday
and try to look at it -
        for that reason i always record whether i'm working with a 360 or 400
degree theodolite...
        i'd just assumed science had gone metric long ago -

George L. Miller schrieb:
> Why inches you ask?  I noticed that your name is not listed in the current
> directory of membership to the Society for Historical Archaeology, so I
> assume that you are a prehistorian.  For you perhaps there is not need to
> use an inch scale.  However, the culture I am interested in measured in
> inches, feet, miles, measured in pints, quarts, gallons and other
> non-metric systems.  Why would I use centimeters in my study English
> ceramics or measure American made bottles in anything other than ounce
> capacity when all of the historical documents related to these artifacts
> give the measurements in the English scales.  I am probably wasting my
> breath trying to explain this to you Geoff, however, I feel that your are
> being very short sighted in your response to the use of inches in the study
> of the past.  For me there is nothing quite as irritating as seeing a
> report on English ceramics giving the dimensions in centimeters.
>
> George L. Miller


geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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