Re:A mathematician's way of converting miles to kilometers
by fhars on Saturday August 10, 2019 @07:04AM
(#20661392)
My favourite use of units is still the „2mm Scale Association“, a British model railroad club that builds their trains at a scale or two millimeteres to the foot (which is slightly larger than the standard N-track). It always blows my mind when I try to think how people come up with a scale like that.
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Re:A mathematician's way of converting miles to kilometers
by mlyle on Saturday August 10, 2019 @09:12AM
(#20661844)
Kinda a crazy ratio, but not -really-.
If you have modelmaking tools measured in mm, and a bunch of legacy dimensions of trains and buildings that are often round numbers of feet, it becomes tempting to use a scale like this. After all, you tend to get round numbers of mm to make things...
It might be convenient to make a starmap where e.g. 10 light years is 1 cm. Yes, the actual dilation factor is strange, but it's pretty easy to plot a set of cartesian coordinates measured in light years on a 1 cm grid.