Still on feet, moving with metres or just sitting down?
G'Day Podeans and Auntie Podeans alike!
It isn't thermodynamics prompting my drift but the argument whether or not Ramanjuan has supremacy over Gauss when it comes to basic geodesy. A grave error was made when the international nautical mile was redefined. An error of 4.1045 Clarke feet.
I'm not saying any good maths undergraduate can blow apart the argument that perimeter is more important than surface area if it comes to modelling the earth as a smooth ellipsoid. Any child with a computer and access to the web can do the same.
In fact I first heard the argument in a pub where the matter under discussion was what would be the visible difference if God spliced an extra yard into a hoop which he had already fashioned to girdle the earth. Try it with a sphere of radius 20901500 feet for simplicity. Amazing! What was a tight fight before now has a clearance of five-and-three-quarter inches.
This proves that scientific definitions are best made with feet not metres, upon a bar, not of temperature controlled platinum but ice-cold Tooheys, Redback, Swan, Gage's or whatever is currently on offer at the The Lucky Shag in Barrack St Perth WA over the festive season. (Bring your own cormorant, it's that kind Shag).
Ron Hatch of GPS is correct. If anyone is looking for a better-fit, intellectual honesty, sounder mathematics and accurate cartography the best offer for the nautical mile is 6080.22ft. Which is coincidentally the old Admiralty Mile of Clarke, Bamford, Gauss, Andoyer, Weems and Lambert. But to redefine the nautical mile back more or less to what it was because t'committee goofed and got the form of the earth sized wrong would lead to too many red faces rather than Two Too many Toohey's.
Jeppesens are proud of their accuracy drawn to a scale of 1 inch to the old nautical mile. God went one better at twelve inches to the foot. Hatch has surveyed it and says the old boys with their glass and brass made a better fist of it than the bunch of academics in Bermuda. He also positions his satellites with a theory suggestive that Einstein didn't quite get everything right. (See his Ether Gage Theory). And now to raise the temperature of my next stubbie by one degree, how fast must my hand move again?
Festive Chiz
Mr and Mrs "E"