[USMA:28346] those conversions in Edmonton article

[Bill and/or Barbara Hooper]

Andy Johnson emphasized that we should be sure look at the "metric conversions" at the end of the Edmonton journal article. Some of them are quite clever and funny. The first two however, were garbled somewhere; I don't know if the Edmonton paper printed them that way or whether the got garbled on the internet or on the email messages that copied the article.

As I saw it in the original article submitted by Nat Hager and later repeated and emphasized by Andy Johnson, the first two conversions read:

1,012 microphones = 1 megaphone

106 bicycles = two megacycles

Clearly these have been erroneously copied. Someone, through whose hands this passed, knew little or nothing about scientific notation (powers of ten), or perhaps knew that but didn't know how to type exponents.

The above two "conversions" should have been:

(10 to the 12th power) microphones = 1 megaphone 

(10 to the 6th power) bicycles = two megacycles

I have written out the powers of ten to avoid having the same problems that my unknown predecessor had. the only way I know to reliably type them in email (without using HTML or something) is to use the caret mark (^) to indicate an exponent, so I would have had to write:

10^12 microphones = 1 megaphone

10^6 bicycles = 2 megacycles

It is interesting that, after the power of ten had been incorrectly written in the first example, the error was compounded by adding a comma to separate the thousands from the hundreds. That is:

10^12 erroneously became 1012 which then became 1,012

This clearly shows that, at some point, someone did not just mistype something, but he or she really thought it was supposed to be one thousand twelve instead of ten to the twelfth power.

At least there was only one error when 10^6 erroneously became 106.

By the way, there are many more of those humerous "conversions". There is even a list in the college physics book I taught from over many years.

Regards,
Bill Hooper
Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA