you better check your current history
you better check your current history
You'd better go to school. You might learn something.
The length of the inch was changed to equal 2.54 cm., see you can find what year historian.
I would quit while you are appearing only a little bit ignorant. We can excuse you as you are probably not very old and thus a touch naive.
Robert you doubt that the length of the inch was changed?
I can well believe an inch has been redefined somewhere by someone with little of any importance to do, but that doesn't mean a mile is a metric distance.
Apologies for calling you ignorant. Naive I'll stick with, young I can only guess at.
Hrm wrote:
1600 meters makes total sense if we ran races like 400, 800, 1600...and 6400 (almost 2.5 mi) or 10,000--the only distance race cleanly divisible by 400m. 400 meter increments make sense if you carry them all the way through.
The 1500m and 3000m races make most sense on 500m tracks which are not used today. If you like the 1500m, then why an 800m race? Why not go 500m, 1000m, 1500m, and 3000m? No matter how you shake it up, it's all very arbitrary.
I'm so awesome at 700m, but I suck at 600m and 800m (I could go as high as 777m, but beyond that, my speed really drops off). What a tragic hand I've been dealt.
I’m surprised to see so many Americans so abject that they dismiss measurements that have served them so well over the centuries and willingly support an, (as it later turned out) inaccurate,unnatural and very foreign measurement of distance - instituted by Napoleon.
Hrm wrote:
The mile makes sense--it's a full unit of measure used by more countries than the United States, and it is still raced by many at international meets--people still care about racing the mile even if they don't car about "mileage."
The mile "makes sense" for historical reasons only. It is NOT used as an official measure in any country outside of the USA. Why? Because the USA is the ONLY country of note left that is not metric. That's it kids, we're alone. (Maybe this helps explain in a very small way why folks in other countries sometimes refer to the USA as insular.) Although there are conversions between Imperial and metric, a foot is not "based on" the meter in any meaningful way.
The big advantage of metric has nothing to do with the precise sizes of the base units. Rather, it has to do with the fact that there is a single base unit for any given quantity and all other variants are based on powers of ten. In the USA, we have a jazillion names for the same darn thing and the conversions are a pain in the butt. Consider: 5280 feet in a mile, 12 inches in a foot. How many inches in 3/4 mile? Most people can't do that in their head. For liquid measure we've got gallona, quarts, pints, cups, tablespoons, teaspoons, and on and on (and let's not forget fluid ounces, as contrasted from solid ounces). Metric has one unit for that, liters. That's it. It's just SO sensible.
Of course, we can't even be consistent in our use of an inconsistent measurement scheme. We buy milk and ice cream by the gallon but soda by the liter. Are we just too stupid to deal with metric dairy products? The whole thing makes me nuts.
And I agree with the idiocy of HS 1600/3200. Either run the mile/2 mile for historical reasons, or do the 1500/3000.
USAnians Still Backwards wrote:[/b
Why race 100m and 200m (and 300m hurdles) if they aren't cleanly divisible by 400m? Do sprinters and hurdlers understand something that distance runners cannot? The mile makes zero sense on 400m tracks, period. Some (very few) countries still use furlongs and acres to measure, just like very few use the mile. Just because a handful of countries remain backwards doesn't mean that it makes sense for the distance to be artificially supported in sport. How much do the Pre Mile and Oslo's Golden Mile really rate on the world scene anymore? Very little, strangely enough. How often is the 1500m contested internationally compared to the mile? Quite a bit more, oddly enough.
Mr. Assbackwards,
Why race the 400m, the 200m, the 800m? These distances mean nothing in the metric system. The only reason they've evolved into the current athletics program is because they're metric equivalents of imperial distances! And don't even start with the 1500m, a completely asinine distance (start over there and finish over here, gee I bet I'm faster than you at 1.5 kilometers - wow, that has a lot of intrigue and power to it!). If you want to go metric then go metric (100m, 250m, 500m, 1000m, etc.). Don't pussyfoot around running quasi imperial distances passing as metric distances on a foolish 400m track.
Question: Why is your factor sequence of 1, 2.5, 5, 10 any more logical than a sequence of 1, 2, 4, 8? 100m is an obvious starting point and doubling is an obvious increment. Further, I understand the desire to "realign" once you hit 1500 in order to get nice round numbers again. I mean, do you really want to run the 6400 or the 12800 instead of 5000/10000? The jump from 800 to 1500 is no less "illogical" than your jump of 100 to 250. For that matter, if what we REALLY want is 3 equivalently spaced distances over a factor of 10 increase, then shouldn't the factor be the cube root of 10? Then we could run the 100m, the 215.4m, the 464m and the 1km. Oh yeah, that would be very sensible.
Of course, we wouldn't be having this conversation if humans had 8 fingers instead of 10 as we'd probably be counting in octal (base 8) rather than decimal (base 10), and thus the sequence would be 1,2,4,10 (10 octal being 8 decimal). You see, the choice of distances is a lot more artibrary than any of us might like to admit.
100m = .1 kilometer
250m = .25 kilometer
500m = .5 kilometer
1000m = 1 kilometer
There is nothing illogical or arbitrary about those distances. The point is we DO have 10 fingers. Arguing for 8 or 6 or 12 fingers is not logical.
Having raced a bit in metric and non-metric (that would be the U.S.) countries I can say that there is one advantage to marking race distances in miles even if the total distance is metric: it's sometimes mentally easier to think of doing 13 miles than 21km. Or whatever.
The only distance it's a big problem with is 5km and 10km. Getting a split at 1km slows a too-fast start 600m earlier than with a mile. Sometimes that can be crucial. 5km and 10km races should give splits at 1km. This would actually be more informative about your predicted finishing time than a one mile split, since most people can multiply by 5 or 10 much better than by 3.10752 or 6.21054.
10km races which don't mark half-way are short-changing you too.
Just my tuppence worth.
No one has brought up the marathon. Obviously it is the same distance everywhere, but is it refered to as "26.2 MILES" everywhere? For example, if we were to ask a Kenyan how far the marathon is, would he answer in miles or meters.
Are splits given at mile marks everywhere? I know they are in the US, but does the London have mile splits or Kilometer splits? Or both?
I think the 1500 and 3000 are ridiculous. every event below the 1500 scales up by a factor of 2 outdoors (100x2=200x2=400x2=800x2=1600 etc) whose idea was it to run 3 3/4 laps instead of 4.
GaryB wrote:
Got one even more stupid, I still hold the mile record at my high school (in Michgan) I went back a few year ago and they had it listed as a 1600 meter record, and had did the adjustment based upon what I ran the mile in.
i dont think that is so stupid, when schools were switching to metric, the school was able to retain prior records and acknowledge the best of its prior runners.
is it a perfect solution? no.
at my school we did the same thing, non-metric recrds had a little astisk with a note saying they were conversions. by now i suspect all are now gone and so the issue is moot.
on another matter, i understand the logic of a system based on 10, but there is nothing magical about the distance of a meter and more than there is about a yard. sure a meter is a division of a part of km, but there is nothing special about the distance of a km.
the whole set of distances we run is goofy in their own way. we run 400m b/c it is the metric "close enough" to a 1/4 MILE. states that run the 1600, instead of the 1500 are just being consistant with that approach.
if track truly wanted to "go metric" we would be racing distances like 500 meters, 250 meters, but we dont and wont.
here is the reason: too much history and tradition in the current distances. which is the same reason the mile is special.
Here's more strange thinking:
Simplot this year ran 1600/3200 meters. They listed records for Frosh-Soph-Jun-Sen classes. They took the mile class records and subtracted and standard for 1600 and listed 1600/3200 class records.
A marathon is 42.195m
Do kids still run the 50 yard dash in PE class?
There used to be 500m tracks. Hence multiples of 5. A six-lapper was the closest thing to 2 miles; a three-lapper was closest to 1 mile. Ten laps got you a 5k. Twenty - 10k.
But now we have 400m tracks, and decades upon decades of tradition. The 10k isn't important because it's ten thousand times a set arbitrary length. It's important because everyone has run it, for a long time. And when you know how fast you ran that distance, you know where you stand. Everyone has run the same distance, if they've run 10k. So we keep things the way they were: 100, 200, 400, 800 because they're easy on our modern tracks. And 1500, 3000, 5k, 10k because half-laps aren't that hard to count, and we can maintain the opportunities for comparisons, the rich tradition, and the memories.