Maybe you're too tolerant, Jim. I found other things objectionable.
For instance they say "... or about 1/100,000 times smaller ...", which
literally means, of course, 100 000 times as big. Obviously, they meant "...
or about 1/100,000 of the size of ..."
"1/100,000" reads, of course, as "one one-hundred-thousandth."
Some innumeracy there, I fear.
(Apart from that, good email! <g>)
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of James R. Frysinger
> Sent: June 08, 2001 18:11
> To: U.S. Metric Association
> Subject: [USMA:13595] Sco X-1 materials
>
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> Because it is so marvelously done and so informative, I am adding a
> link to your Sco X-1 Annotated Guide (and associated movie) at
> http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/pr/scox1/scox100.htm
> I certainly hope that it remains available for a long time for our
> astronomy students to view and study. This is a superb teaching
> resource on neutron star binaries and their emissions.
>
> However, one thing about your graphics and text stunned me. You used
> "billions of miles" as the scaling units for the graphics and in your
> discussion! Why on Earth (or elsewhere) did you not use terameters?
> (Or, as accepted by the IAU but less universally well known among
> non-astronomers, astronomical units--or even parsecs?) I realize that
> at these scales, the size of the field of view is outside human
> experience, but "miles" must seem now to be almost as anachronistic to
> 95% of the people of the world as do "leagues". We science educators in
> the United States work hard to teach our students that scientists use
> the SI and this makes our task a bit more difficult.
>
> If the site weren't so tremendously valuable and unique, your unit
> choice would have kept me from posting a link to it. Except for that
> oddity, well done and thank you for making this resource available.
>
> regards,
> James R. Frysinger
>
> --
> James R. Frysinger University/College of Charleston
> 10 Captiva Row Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> Charleston, SC 29407 66 George Street
> 843.225.0805 Charleston, SC 29424
> http://www.cofc.edu/~frysingj [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cert. Adv. Metrication Specialist 843.953.7644
>
