Sir, – I must come to this paper’s defence, and take issue with Liam O’Grady (April 10th) who feels that The Irish Times should have done the conversion from nautical miles to kilometres when publishing an article on a maritime matter.
Without going into the details of how each standard was established, when I was going to school, which was not today or yesterday, the nautical mile was approximately one and an eighth of the statute mile, which was our standard then, and a kilometre was approximately five-eights of a statute mile.
Knot (sorry) not knowing this could cause you to lose marks in the “primo” or even the “Inter”. And we had no calculators then. – Yours, etc,