NY wrote:

"jkn" wrote in message
...
On Sunday, January 20, 2019 at 6:23:59 PM UTC, Max Demian wrote:
On 13/01/2019 12:35, Roger Hayter wrote:

I think the decimetre gets used quite a lot, at least in France. We
don't seem to use it at all.

The Range sells net curtains by the decimetre, but they don't brag
about it.

--
Max Demian

Most fabrics are sold (retail) in multiples of 10cm, FWIW. I don't often
see it
referred to as a decimetre though

No, it is convention to use powers of 1000 - so:

1/1,000,000
1/1000
1
1000
1,000,000


That's why modern rev counters are calibrated as 1, 2, 3 x1000 rpm rather
than the older standard of 10, 20, 30 x100 rpm. (Coupled with that, having
two gauges calibrated 10, 20, 30 - 80 is ripe for confusion.)

So 10 cm rather than 1 dm.

100 m rather than 1 hm.

That convention certainly applies to science and engineering. And,
generally, in the UK we stick to it. But then we use cm rather than mm
very frequently (and make frequent errors in the conversion - see about
1 in 4 Amazon specs) and the French use dm as well as cm and mm. So
the convention does not seem to apply to daily life. We don't use dm
much, though. But we are much more likely to use tens or hundreds of cm
rather than 100s or 1000s of mm.

--

Roger Hayter