My newspaper has a small section where sometimes they print interesting or odd facts. In yesterday's paper it listed "What you'll find in 10.76 square feet of meadowland soil" and it said things like 700 spiders, 9 million threadworms, 400 ants, etc. It had an asterisk and said that this was within a depth of about one foot.
I usually don't make an issue of non-metric quantities in a newspaper intended for Americans not necessarily familiar with the metric system, but this one just made me laugh out loud. Do they really think that "10.76 square feet" is more understandable than "one square meter"? I'm not sure who to write to on this. It was in the Deseret News, the feature was copyrighted by "World Features Syndicate" (which I can't find on line), it was "by Karl A. Van Asselt", and it listed as a source "Life Counts" (Michael Gleich, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002). I took a look at "Life Counts" in my local library, and it is a translation from German and has metric throughout. I couldn't find where the quotation was from. That feature would have been a perfect place to use metric, but somewhere along the line someone thought that "10.76 square feet" would be better. Carl
