Why are nautical miles different than statute miles?

 

In case anyone might have interest. This is in SC. I think original owner:

 

VW SUV commercial, shooting took three days over various locations in Istanbul.
I was the lead driver.
Great crew, incredibly nice director, it was a fun project.



That blue Touareg is $243K over here, and you need to shell out $155 to fill its fuel tank.

(Takes almost $78 to fill up my Miata)

 

To make the meager speed of the Cessna 152, the Miata of the sky, I fly seem even more pathetic.

Actually, it's because one nautical mile corresponds to one minute of latitude of the globe. In theory it makes navigation over long distances easier. Nearly all countries use feet for altitude and nautical miles for distance and speed in aviation, except when it comes to reporting the weather, which is done in statute miles in Canada. That brings us to three different units of distance measurement. Atmospheric pressure is measured in millibars when talking about the weather, but in inches of mercury when talking about altimeter settings.

Russia and China are the only ones who've gone metric in aviation.

Unrelated picture was taken two weeks ago while overflying the St Lawrence River.

 

 

A nautical mile is defined as one minute of latitude, which I expect makes it a convenient unit for use at sea when you're navigating by star sightings and the like.

It's like how interstellar distances were originally measured in parsecs, which is one ARC-second of PARallax measured at the radius of the Earth's orbit around the sun. That's how they measured it -- looking at how far a star's image moved compared to the background on photographic plates taken 6 months apart.

(now they're usually converted to light-years, which is another non-SI/metric unit that's way more convenient for interstellar distances than using trillions of km)

Context is important.




--Ian

 

When I'm doing anything related to measuring length, such as drawing a room in AutoCAD so that I can lay out equipment in it, I work in decimal inches. No feet, no fractions.

It drives architects nuts when they look at my drawings, but I can't be the only one who does this, as AutoCAD includes a preset in the DimStyle window to select this exact measuring system. Decimal inches, and you get to specify the number of zeroes.

Makes intuitive sense to me. I mean, calipers, be they dial or vernier, read in decimal inches.

My Stanley laser-measurer has the same feature. I have it set to read in decimal inches.

Even when I'm working with the floorplan of the 100th floor of Sears Tower, still decimal inches. I re-scaled the drawings which the building gave me to work in this format.

And it doesn't even require metrologists from around the flat disc which we call Earth to gather together in the basement of the Pavillon de Breteuil in Paris every few years to compare the length of their dicks weight of their witches.

 

I just sensed Al Mooney doing an aileron roll in his grave.

 

I believe it's time for a new thread, something along the lines of "Wherein we geek/nerd out without killing the humor thread." Or are your cats entertained by this stuff? Because ours isn't (well she's dead, but that's no excuse).

 

I'm still feeling pretty entertained, and learning a thing or two to boot.

For those that don't know, airplanes should NOT have this many prop blades. It's just unnatural and a pain in the *** for maintenance.

 

 

A counter-balanced, single blade propeller is actually a thing.

 

Of course it is.

I mean, why WOULDN'T someone want a fixed, single blade prop in an application which doesn't absolutely require one?

That's just common sense.

[/sarcasm]


Anyway:




Yup. That 1990 Honda CRX just sold for $40,000 in Florida.

Because of course it did.



https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1990-honda-crx-33

 

A Miata is a little dorky, affordable, lacks performance, is often an entry stepping stone into the hobby, and lacks prestige, but is fun and lovable anyway. To me, a C152 is all of these things. A Mooney is something else.

 

A rare surviving example of Cesena's prototype entry into the automobile market in 1971:

 

 

Video is 100% fake. At the end you can see a cop carrying a dog. If the video was real he would have shot the dog.

 

looks to me like he was trying to ride the dog...

 

The dude who ran out of the house, towards the cops who were roaring into the scene... Was he holding a gun? While running towards police officers who already have adrenaline pouring out of their ears because they've been high-speed-pursuiting an SUV that just flew through the air sideways?

That's not wise.


Anyway, here's the tiny little rabbit which darted past me as I was walking out to the garage this morning:



We have a lot of these around here.

Which reminds me of a joke:

An owl and a squirrel were perched atop a fence, watching a farmer drive back and forth across his fields.

The own turned to the squirrel, and said nothing. Because owls can't talk.

It then ate the squirrel.