My friend and his partner recently holidayed in the USA. It is their second visit and he likes the country and found the people friendly, polite, and helpful.
However, in our conversation he described US Television as insular. That, there was very little reporting on international events, other than IRAC. As far as US Television was concerned, he felt his own country no longer existed. He considered that they tended stay on a nationional stories for an extraordinary length of time. That anywhere else in the world that style of reporting may have taken up valuable airtime required on more pertinent issues elsewhere in the country and the world. If there is a systemic issue that US Television is insular, then it is no surprise that "hard or soft" metric measurements are being denied to the public via their media. (Just a note: He also commented on the US postal system. As the US postal service only states sizes in inches, his partner who is 28 years old was confused on the size of the envelope she could post back home. They used the "inch to centimetre" conversion application that was available in his mobile phone to understand the allowed sizes.) -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 5 October 2004 10:59 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:31227] flight to space Oct 4 2004 October 4 PBS Newshour You people report on the airplane that flew high enough to win a prize. You said it went up 65 miles. What you did not say is that the prize is for going up 100 km above the surface of the earth. Why do you play dumb? Is the Newshour so limited that while the whole world talks kilometers, the you keep us in our little private region of old measures, in this case, miles? The Christian Science Monitor can tell us kilometers. Why can't you? The press is possibly the biggest factor in keeping the US from using modern units, namely, metric units. The Associated Press is especially bad. Is the Newshour trying to stay in bad company? Robert Bushnell [EMAIL PROTECTED] 303-554-0827
