I thank Nat and Bill for helping along the efforts to make a few jokes with some downright silly "conversions."
One of my goals is to find a way to force metric conversation into the media. Mayhe the way to get more play on TV and on radio and in the newspaper would be if all of us might look for ways to talk about metrication while also entertaining folks with as ridiculous as these "conversations." I can't imagine anything more urgent for those of us who want to move forward with metrication...than finding ways to induce the media to bring metric terms into more common usage, even if it depends on doing silly bogus conversions. Andy Johnson --- Bill and/or Barbara Hooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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 ===== Andy Johnson Host of "Down to Business Andy Johnson" Florida's Best & Most Efficacious Talk Show AM1280 WSVE & http://www.downtobusiness.org weekdays, noon--3 p.m., east coast time. On-air: 904-713-9783 (713-WSVE) Off-air: 904-568-0769 Non-voters are not welcome on Andy's show. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
