My first experience with this "problem" was sometime in 1960's when I was a student in the M&P class. Today's drawing looks sort of like it did then (maybe) but it has suffered through repeated copying of the cleaner originals. However, that does not mean that there may have not been small inaccuracies in "frame" sizes between the two "views" and locations of certain details - after all they are hand-drawn illustrations and not copies of real photographs. The "salient" points about the exercise are the distances between locations marked on the two drawings that were made to represent approximately the important items that the students were supposed to pick-up on and interpret. Note that the word "approximately" is included to allow some room for the student to use intuition (maybe even to figure out as Bob did that the error was probably a simple typo) to come up with a logical answer ... even with made-up measurements ... as long as they demonstrate they use or apply the principles involved. I will admit that precision is something to be admired and for forensic applications something that always needs to be practiced when making measurements but as Bob rightly said this is to some extent supposed to be a fun project to encourage the student think. Anyway, this exercise will probably continue to be included "as is" in the lab in which it is included for possibly another 40 years! When I saw this in a copy of a student workbook it reminded me of my student days. It was a fun project for me. I hope the studnet who run across this with the instructors who offer this course today will also recognize it as a neat project ... that probably could benefit slightly from refinements but which generally works as well today as in the past to make one think about the principles involved. On a different topic I wonder if photography students need to know anything about logarithms. :) cheerio, andy
