Right on Geoff!

Carl Steen

5/30/2001 4:50:41 PM, geoff carver <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>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 capacity when all of the historical documents related to these artifacts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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>