Sorry Bill, I really didn't take note of the "metric conversions" at the bottom, as we've all seen them so many times before. Knowing the list prefers ASCII, I simply converted accordingly.
Nat PS My favorite remains 10^21 picolos = 1 gigolo <g> -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Potts Sent: Wednesday, 2004 January 21 22:28 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:28347] RE: those conversions in Edmonton article I suspect Nat Hager knew that, but trusted the rest of us to recognize, as you did (and as I did), that they were exponents. I pointed out, in USMA: 28341, that he could have preserved them in an HTML-formatted email. Unfortunately, email software does not typically allow one to format characters as superscripts (Outlook 2000 certainly doesn't), so he would have to have copied the existing HTML code (from the web site where he found it) to a message set up for HTML formatting, rather than the plain text message he used. It shouldn't really be a big deal to us cognoscenti, though. <g>. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bill and/or Barbara Hooper Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 19:16 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:28346] those conversions in Edmonton article 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
