value of GRAD angle mode, thought experiment

[Maximilian Hohmann]

Hello!

(03-08-2023 12:30 AM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  Yet financial functions can be used to very good effect, see for example HP-12C Serendipitous Solver, which is an 8-page article for the HP-12C financial calculator, ...

Thank you for reminding me/us of this excellent article of yours. All those years I had it somewhere on my hard drive and will now finally try out your algorithm. As a matter of coincidence I just received (yet another...) HP-12C, that was sold on eBay as "defective" for five Euros. Of cousre it is not defective, I have not come across a defective Voyager series calculator yet, it just required new batteries. And why should it be defective, it is only 41 years old :-)

(03-08-2023 12:30 AM)Valentin Albillo Wrote:  For instance there are artillery sights and compasses with 6,400 NATO mils

I do not want to know how many innocent people and how many friendly troops were killed over the years because of unit confusions. And how many ships and U-boats were rammed into cliffs because of that. In movies like "Das Boot" (which probably most have seen) they keep issuing commands like "steer two dez to port", "dez" must mean ten degrees, or "aim the torpedoes 4 strich starboard".

With the unit "mil" it gets even more confusing because it is also stands for a length: a millionth of an inch. And to maximise the confusion, native speakers in imperial units tend to also use "mil" when the refer to metric units. Please! use Mu (lowercase greek letter M) for that. A millionth of a metre (or a thousandth of a millimeter) is not a "mil" but a μm (micrometer). Again, I do not want to know how many rockets exploded, space probes missed their targets and aeroplanes crashed because of parts being out of specifications due to "mil-confusion".

Regards
Max