aaah, depends.......do they still bury people 6ft underground?
aaah, depends.......do they still bury people 6ft underground?
No, definitely not.aaah, depends....
I had some expertise and experience with the reason they modified the Cemetery Regulations in Victoria, in a past life while investigating irregularities in the burials at the Melbourne General Cemetery where for various reasons the Cemetery staff allowed some weird practices like strata burials in re-used ground and public burials where we found 21 coffins squeezed into spaces with memorials on them and several graves in reuse areas where we rodded the graves to find the last coffin interred had about 21 inches ground cover. After six months of investigation and finally getting confessions from staff we charged the Secretary and office staff with various offences, but not with breaches of the Cemeteries Act as you had to be an authorised person to lay charges under that Act. When the Cemetery Trust was likely to be sacked they resigned enmasse. When the Springvale Cemetery Trust took over the administration of MGC special amendments were made to retrospectively alter the legal minimum burial so that the re-use and built up areas were legal. The investigation file we submitted was about 14 inches high when the two of us completed the investigation! That was a long time ago. in the mists of time.aaah, depends....
A fine example of 'ignorance is bliss'!TVs have been measured in inches again for a very long time. And now they are so big that you have to do a mental conversion to feet and inches in order to visualise the size, if you're not actually looking at it.
Another weird thing about US measurements. Have you noticed that they don't appear to use tons? They just use pounds. So they will state a ship's weight in thousands of pounds. Very hard to get your head around.
I recall reading an American technical magazine about 45 years ago. It might have been Scientific American. An excellent magazine at the time. They had a section for letters to the editor. A reader, in all seriousness, wrote explaining why the US commercial aviation industry was so far ahead of the Europeans. Lockheed and Boeing dominated and there was no Airbus. The reason that he gave was the greater accuracy and finer tolerances used by those companies. The US industry measured components using thousandths of an inch. The Europeans only had millimetres.
I was teaching Auto. Eng. in TAFE WA @ that time. On decree we immediately taught & changed to the SI metric system.Is it not illegal to advertise products in imperial units? I know a ban cause much grief in the construction industry in the 70s. At one point sale of foot and inch tapes and rules were banned. Metrication was forced on a largely unsympathetic public who were at home with the old system.
Most full sheet material I have bought (in both timber and metal) has been (and often still is) 2440 x 1220?They also forced sheet materials to become 2400x1200.
That's interesting. I thought I was the only one with that problem. Worked in the industrial gases industry for years and was (and still) quite at home with metric pressure units, but I can still only think of tyre pressure in psi. Similarly, miles per gallon for fuel efficiency.Last night I evened up my tyre pressures to 38 PSI.
I'm pretty good with metric, but tyre pressure, nah
I've still got the booklet sent to every address in Oz, though I'll always go for my 'thou' feeler gauges to confirm my points open 16 thou, and (lower case) psi tyre pressures.Early decree following was a government thing.
I was the poor sucker running a design office. Conversion was a nightmare, and very expensive in design and drafting time. Every desk and board (no CAD everywhere then) had extensive conversion tables pinned on. Most things didn't change, fortunately, but everything now needed to be described in millimetres. (For example, a brick course is 3 inches high plus a joint, round about 3/8", the length of a brick still is 9 inches. Do you ever think about sizing brick walls? A rod chart is attached for the curious)
Many things, like piping just adopted nominal metric bores (to this day the world uses BSP inch sizes) and carried on. Timber sections just got described in nominal 50mm increments - no real change there either, they were always nominal off saw. Standard door openings became a nominal 2100x900 to suit standard 2040x820 doors.
One disastrous exception was that some SI enthusiast persuaded Australia to go to 1200x600 ceiling grids, which prevented the butting of troffer light fittings (because the world uses 4 ft tubes, - 1219mm) They also forced sheet materials to become 2400x1200.
Structural design had to use a host of odd units - does anybody have a feeling for a kiloPascal? More conversion tables. Steel sections didn't change then. Concrete now was to be worked out in mm, using the same calculation principles adapted to the new dimensions. Machine computing wasn't normal then as it is now, as few could program or afford the machines. Engineering packages for everyday use were in the future.
So you can see why there were look-up tables pinned everywhere. Conversion slowed us down, and was resisted in most non-government places during the changeover period until it became compulsory to use SI for all clients. Then we had to grin and bear it.