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Subject: Sexagesimal (was Newbie - Variation..)
From: Brian Whatcott (inet@XXX.XXX)
Date: Sat Feb 16 2002 - 23:05:24 EST
At 04:16 PM 2/16/02, Trevor Kenchington wrote:
>Bearings expressed in 360-degree notation are, by definition,
>constrained to be positive numbers in the range of zero to 360.
Actually, it is not quite correct to suppose one can strictly refer to
0 degrees AND 360 degrees.
It's like saying numbers in the base 10 range from 0 to 10 rather
than 0 to 9. These would be the numbers of the eleven-base
number system.
Your difficulty is in fact an inheritance from the Babylonian
number system we use for angular measurements (usually)
which was 60 based - but initially had no symbol for a zero
place holder, for example at the sixth cycle of sixties.
But it is a small and academic point of no great interest to a
biologist.
Moreover, I am sure sailors and airmen sometimes use these
designations interchangeably. All the same there are cases
where this can lead to error.
Brian Whatcott
Altus OK Eureka!
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