Sir, – Your online edition refers to the recent sinking of an adrift Japanese ship stricken by last year’s tsunami and refers to nautical miles (April 6th). This seems to be the usual practice of your newspaper. Why? Most people don’t know what a nautical mile is and even those that do perhaps do not use them on a day-to-day basis. Wouldn’t it be better to simply use a unit of distance that we are all familiar with and indeed use every day of our lives, when travelling from place to place. To assist The Irish Times in doing this, I can now inform you (because I checked) that a nautical mile is 1,852 metres. If you could simply make the conversion in future, we would all be grateful. – Yours, etc,