Re: Time in South Dakota (Date and Time on Cindu)

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 1:37 PM, ROGER MILLS <rfmilly@...> wrote:
> At one point I considered having the Circle circle/globe consist of
> 400 "degrees" but my math skills simply weren't up to the task, so I stayed
> with 360.
That unit (1/100 of a right angle) is actually called a grad(e); it
was proposed as part of the metric system and was, I think, adopted by
the French for artillery calculations.  My calculators used to have it
as an available option for the trigonometric functions.  But it's
mostly died out in favor of degrees and radians.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grad_%28angle%29

GeekTrivia: the original Star Trek "Technical Manual" stated that
Starfleet used grads, but this was contradicted by onscreen evidence,
notably Star Trek II, which showed them clearly using degrees. (On the
other hand, there was that time that Kirk said "Bring us about, Mr.
Sulu, 360 degrees...", so maybe they really use 1/720 of a circle...
;-))

Oddly, the manual also specified that a relative bearing of "0 mark 0"
was due *aft* instead of the expected forward.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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