Letters to the Editor
Moon Metrics Oliver Stewart
The Church and the People,
Richard Whitaker, Rev. E. 0. Sutton
An Anatomy of Hysteria F. R. G. Smith,
Bennitt Gardiner
Keeping up with the Rices David H. Shipman The Block Grant F. C. A. Catnmaerts For the Record D. Courtney Etnbley The Nash Terraces Robert Aspland Male or Female? Susan Raven Sadism on TV David B. Spillett
Travelling Grants to the US
Air Chief Marsha! Sir Francis Fogarty
Standards for Consumers Michael Young The Blitz Tom Hopkinson Arthur Rackham Derek Hudson Ben-Gurion and `Mapain' Our Israel Correspondent
MOON METRICS
Sia,—In any attempts the Western Powers may make to catch the Russians in the design, construction and Operation of satellites and space vehicles, they must be hampered by their use of the fantastically con- fused units of weights and measures still favoured by Britain and America. The outer limits of lunacy in linear measures were reached in a Ministry of Supply statement about the use of radar for tracking the satellites. In one hundred words, three radically different units of length, the mile, the nautical mile and the centimetre, were mingled in a metrological hotchpotch. Information about the two sputniks is befuddled by inaccurate conversions of the Russian figures, which are in the metric system, to British Imperial weights and measures. If Britain and America hope to make rapid progress in a field Where there is no time for juggling with outdated and unstandardised measures, they must turn to the metric system.—Yours faithfully, OLIVER STEWART Outsvood, Surrey
Previous page
