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I've seen many programs where the scientist or the person
being interviewed spoke only in metric, and the narrator spoke in FFU. It
really was annoying.
A few years ago, Matt Lauer of NBC was doing a show from
the Leaning Tower of Pisa and was asking the British scientist there about the
structure and made a big effort to use feet and inches. The British
scientist ignored Matt's gibberish and spoke only in metric. One could
tell Matt was upset that the guy didn't take Matt's hints and speak in
FFU.
Euric
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, 2004-10-25 18:23
Subject: [USMA:31360] Eating a bit of
crow
Well, I'm happy to say I saw a program on
supervolcanoes last night produced for Discovery by the BBC that was mostly
metric. Even the American scientists were mostly using SI (though some used
kuh-LA-muh-ters instead of KILL-oh-meters, including one fellow who used
both pronunciations at different times in the same sentence!). Perhaps the
biggest shock of all was that the American narrator was allowed to use SI,
sometimes all by itself, sometimes followed by the US Customary
equivalent.
In any case, this bodes well. I hope the trend
continues on Discovery (which had been adamantly refusing to use metric as
much as possible based on the shows I had seen in the past) and that it
spreads to other networks as well.
Ezra
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