I’ve realized that the display size, in inches, is sometimes in the name or model number of electronics that are sold not just in the US. Do people outside the US also talk about buying 55-inch TVs, 14-inch laptops, and 27-inch monitors? Does it naturally roll off the tongue or does it seem strange to anyone?
If it’s all inches, why didn’t measuring screens in centimeters take off?
The airlines measuring things in feet gets under my skin so hard. >:(
It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:
The bizarre thing is that these are all conventions that stemmed from good rationale, at least initially. Using meters for horizontal distances means it’s hard to confuse it with vertical distance, when speaking over rough radio comms. Statute miles is what the meteorological agency in the USA would report, and ATC provides that information to pilots. And nautical miles, as the name suggests, has a rich seafaring tradition, which aviation adopted wholesale.
It’s why aircraft have the red (left) and green (right) navigational lights, same as ships do. It’s also why the “rule of the road” for two intersecting aircraft is for the right-hand aircraft to go first, since their pilot sees the other’s green light, while showing a red light to the halting aircraft.
TL;DR: everything boils down to: “it’s how we’ve always done it”
Tho relationship of nautical miles and knots for speed is really good for navigating over a sphere. There are some handy shortcuts that make quick mental calculations fast and intuitive, specially with an e6b flight computer (not an electronic).
The alternative would’ve been to use euclidean planes, projections and radian transformations, which would’ve been harder to use for navigating.
not really. distance is measured in (nautical) miles, speed in knots (1 knot is 1 nautical mile per hour)
It actually works pretty well by chance more than anything else. 1000 ft is a really good altitude separation between aircraft. 500 is a good offset for irregular traffic too. Multiples of 150/300 m are more annoying to work with and 500/1000 m would waste an excessively large amount of airspace.
why though?