I just received a response back from National Geographic about a letter I sent them about a month ago. I wrote telling them that I expect a magazine of their caliber to use the SI system, or at the very least to at least put SI when the original measurement was SI and to relegate 'customary' to a secondary position. I told them if they switch to SI (or at least use primary metric and relegate non-metric to secondary) I will immediately sign back up to receive there publication.
The response I received, to sum it up in once sentence, was "Thank you for writing to us about SI; we are sorry to loose you as a customer". I don't agree with the statement that National Geographic is 'dumbing down' units. That would imply that they are changing from a hard to understand system to a much easier system for the common person, so easy that even a 'dummy' can understand it. Instead National Geographic is often times 'complicating up' the numbers to harder to understand, and often less accurate due to the conversion, non-metric units. Richard On 1/25/07, Harry Wyeth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Another drives-me-nuts product of the National Geographic! HARRY WYETH ----- Original Message ----- *From:* Harry Wyeth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *To:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Thursday, January 25, 2007 12:18 AM *Subject:* Nonsense "traditional" measurements Dear Editors; No one, but no one, in the English speaking world measures height in yards. But on page 142 of the January issue we read about the Arctic travelers encountering "six yard(s) high" ice blockages. In an article about an expedition from Russia by Norwegian and South African venturers, would it be too difficult to tell it the way they experienced it--with metric measurements? They surely didn't relate to any media that the ice floes were "six yards" high! The height was 6 m. The open lead referred to was 400 m wide. The 375 pound sleds were 170 kg. And at the end, they discovered that they were 1000 m or one km from the North Pole (not 1000 yards!), for heaven's sake. By dumbing down worldwide metric standard measurements, your editors are insulting Americans' intelligence. HARRY WYETH
