Yesterday I came across a special on the Discovery Channel on the giant
squid. The special focused on zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera and his team
of Japanese researchers. (If you're not familiar with their work,
they're responsible for the first photographs of a giant squid in their
natural habitat.)
They travelled about 1000 km south of Tokyo and sent bait over 900 m
down into the water, where a giant squid went after it. It got stuck
and released one of it's tentacles to get away; the tentacle they pulled
up was almost 6 m in length!
If you know any Japanese, you can clearly hear the researchers
mentioning their measurements in SI, and when they show the depth of the
bait on their ship computers, it plainly shows metres, 800 m, 850 m, 900
m, 967 m, etc.
So what did Discovery do? They converted every single measurement back
to feet for the voice-over! There was one part on the show where
Kyoichi Mori, the photographer, points to the tentacle and says "nearly
6 metres", and while they're showing the tentacle with the on-board
computer that says "960 m", the voice-over says, "The tentacle is nearly
20 feet in length, and was caught at over 3000 feet below the surface."
ARGH! Why can't they just leave the measurements in the form in which
they were taken? This is supposed to be science, is it not?
Cheers,
Mike
