NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Sexagesimal (was Newbie - Variation..)
From: Brian Whatcott
Date: 2002 Feb 16, 22:05 -0600
From: Brian Whatcott
Date: 2002 Feb 16, 22:05 -0600
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!