Units Was: Where is balance 278

On Thursday, in article

I underwent a culture shock the other day. I was called upon to act as one of three invigilators in our university's exam hall (under the direction of a Chief Invigilator, who was not only not a fellow employee, but a free-lance professional invigilator).

There were five different exams taking place in the hall, with the different groups of students divided topically. As I paced around the room (from time to time, it upsets the examinees if invigilators are always prowling) I noticed the sheet of "Conversion Factors" that had been given to one group, and was amazed to see that it quote a density of water as 1.938 slugs-ft^3 (The actual number was of that sort of order, but I may have misremembered it).

"Who on earth still uses slugs", I asked myself; I thought they'd been abandoned well before I worked with CGS and later with MKS (and now SI) way back in the 1950s.

After the examinations had finished, and the students had left the hall, I picked up one of the question papers. It was a second-year examination in Flight Mechanics, and had questions starting with "An aircraft is flying at 400kt at an albreastude of 20,000ft, where the speed of sound is 328m-s..." (and so on for a 5cm high paragraph across the width of A4 paper, followed by a list of calculations and graphs to be made).

Now I had heard people say that our degree course in Aeromechanical Engineering is the most difficult that we offer: I hadn't realized that the poor sods had to convert back and forth between very archaic Imperial units and metric as well.

-- "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Blaise Pascal,Lettres Provinciales-, 1657