In a message dated Mon, 9 Jul 2001 12:27:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time, "kilopascal" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

<< 2001-07-09

When I see something like 206.99  mL it makes me think the guy or gal who is
responsible for the text on the label is very anti-metric.  If it was their
way they would not put metric on at all, but since they have to, they will
make it as ugly as possible.  They hope that when people see something like
that, they will be so turned off to metric, they will write their
congressman to have all metric laws repealed.

I think it's just ignorance.  The label writer was given the conversion factor, 
multiplied, and wrote down whatever the calcular said.  A similar bit of ignorance 
exists with bulk packages of Pedigree dog food bought at Costco:

Pedigree (Waltham) is hard metric.  The bags and cans are all even:  20 kg, 625 g, 
etc.  In this case the dog food is a package of 24 cans.  24 x 625 g = 15,000 g = 15 
kg.  Well, the piece of paper wrapped in the package on top of the cans gives the 
total of the package as "14.97 kg".  What happened is that someone, through ignorance, 
multiplied the wombat mass by 24 and back-converted to metric, rather than the logical 
and obvious calculation shown above. 

I wrote to them about this and got a nice letter and three 1-dollar coupons for dog 
food but nothing was changed.  Sad, for a company otherwise out in the forefront of 
things.

Carleton

Reply via email to