I'm pretty confident that the editors of all the newspapers give the
contributors the freedom to use the units they want to with the Independant
being no different.
You may have made assumptions because the Independant is a leftist
newspaper. However this does not mean that all the writers for the
Independant are leftists - rather that the "main position" of the paper is
that way.
From: "Ezra Steinberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Subject: [USMA:39315] Re: Still a long way to go in the British press
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2007 20:36:53 -0700
Yeah, that's what I had remembered people saying about the Telegraph.
But this was the Independent, which I thought made good use of metric.
That's why I got concerned when I saw the article.
Ezra
----- Original Message -----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2007 1:40 PM
Subject: [USMA:39313] Re: Still a long way to go in the British press
Was this the Telegraph? They are horribly retrograde on metric.
Carleton
-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Ezra Steinberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I thought folks on this list had pointed out that the UK Independent
uses metric more than other papers. Maybe I'm misremembering and they were
speaking of another British paper.
Anyhow, it's for that reason that I was surprised to see the article
below (which I found looking for dinosaur news) demonstrating how a
respectable UK paper can still print a science article (not general news)
using only Imperial (not even dual units) in 2007.
Kinda depressing, I know. Reads just like any article I would expect
to see in an American newspaper!
Ezra
Fossils 2007: The golden age of dinosaurs
Scarcely a month goes by without palaeontologists hailing another
amazing discovery. Coincidence? Not at all, says Steve Connor: the way we
understand the distant past is evolving
Published: 27 June 2007
It has been a wonderful season for dinosaur enthusiasts. New
discoveries as far apart as China, South Africa and Spain have put some
meaningful flesh on the fossilised bones of the biggest-ever beasts to walk
the land. With each new discovery, dinosaurs are becoming a little less
mysterious than they once seemed.
Chinese scientists have led the way with a series of stunning finds,
such as the discovery of a giant bird-like creature that walked on two
legs, weighed more than a ton and was armed with dagger-like claws and a
bone-crushingly large beak.
Twice as tall as a man, Gigantoraptor was the stuff of nightmares. Its
fearsome head and parrot-like beak sat on a muscular, elongated neck. Its
body was also covered in feathers, underscoring the growing realisation
that modern birds are almost certainly the living descendants of dinosaurs.
The announcement of Gigantoraptor's discovery in the Gobi desert of
inner Mongolia came just a day after another team of researchers said that
they had identified the remains of a new species of mini-dinosaur found in
South Africa. It turned out that the creature was related to two of the
lumbering vegetarians of the dinosaur world - Stegosaurus and Triceratops -
which are famous for their armour-plated skins and horny protective ruffs.
Only this time, the bones of Eocursor parvus, or "little dawn runner",
indicated it was far sleeker and smaller than its massive cousins. In fact
it grew no bigger than a fox, according to the scientists who had finally
got round to analysing the fossils 12 years after they were unearthed at a
site in South Africa's Orange Free State.
It is not the first time that dinosaurs - creatures synonymous with
giants - have turned out to have their pygmy variations. Last year, for
instance, scientists revealed that fossils excavated from a quarry in
Germany belonged to a member of the sauropod dinosaurs, which are famous
for specimens growing up to 150ft long and weighing as much as 80 tons.
Only this time, the sauropod dinosaur weighed less than a ton and stopped
growing at 20ft.
Size difference is just one of the many features to emerge from the
latest discoveries of dinosaur fossils. With the sophisticated tools of the
modern laboratory, scientists can glean far more about the life and
behaviour of what may otherwise seem like a pile of old bones.
Two recent studies, for example, have shed light on how dinosaurs
moved, even though this aspect of behaviour is not directly preserved when
a dinosaur's remains become fixed in stone. The findings demonstrate how
far scientists have come in their ability to study this bizarre group of
animals that ruled the land for more than 160 million years before finally
becoming extinct some 65 million years ago.
Loic Costeur, of the University of Nantes, was studying the sandstone
deposits at a well-known dinosaur site at La Virgen del Campo in the
Cameros Basin of northern Spain when he spotted a trackway of scratch
marks. It turned out that they were made by the hind limbs of a bipedal
dinosaur as it swam against a strong current.
Dinosaur tracks preserved in stone are well documented, but this was
the first time that experts had found an underwater trackway made by a
true-swimming dinosaur. It moved by paddling its hind legs a bit like a
modern duck, Dr Costeur said.
"The trackway is quite amazing. It cannot have been made by a walking
dinosaur because the scratch marks are quite delicate, with long grooves
made in the sediment indicating a large, swimming animal," he said.
"They are so delicate that they could only be made by an animal whose
body was supported by water. There were also ripple marks in the sandstone,
indicating that the water was up to three metres deep," he added.
Conventional studies of the fossilised remains of dinosaurs, whether
bones, skin, eggs or tracks, can yield only so much about the true nature
of these creatures. Computers, medical scanners and other modern analytical
tools have allowed scientists to go much further into dinosaur behaviour.
John Hutchinson, of the Royal Veterinary College, University of
London, has carried out a detailed mathematical study of how Tyrannosaurus
rex, the greatest of all land carnivores, managed to move at speed. He
concluded from biomechanical calculations of its bone structure - which he
fed into a series of computer models - that T. rex would have been front
heavy and could manage no more than a "leisurely jog" at a top speed of
15mph. Unlike modern carnivores, T. rex would have only been able to turn
slowly on two legs if it had chased, rather than scavenged, its prey.
But, as lumbering as it was, T. rex was still an agile hunter
according to an analysis of its skull using a medical brain scanner. The
dinosaur had a relatively sophisticated inner ear - the organ of balance
and poise - compared to diplodocus, a large and lumbering herbivorous
dinosaur. And although T. rex's brain was small, it had a relatively large
olfactory centre, giving it a good sense of smell.
"What we see in T. rex is very different to diplodocus. We see an
inner ear, the organ of balance, that is associated with a much smaller,
more agile animal. T. rex is a gigantic animal and we might have expected
its inner ear to be more like that of diplodocus," said Professor Lawrence
Witner, of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine.
"This may show that T. rex had a heightened sense of equilibrium and
balance and was able to employ relatively rapid turning movements of its
eyes and its head," Professor Witner said.
Fossilised bones can also tell scientists how the biggest dinosaurs
managed to grow so big - they did not just grow continually throughout
life, but experienced an adolescent growth spurt. A study of T. rex at
Florida State University analysed the creature's bones and found that its
growth rings indicated that it grew much faster in its younger years than
later in life. Whether T. rex cared for its young is still an open
question, but there is convincing evidence that at least some species of
dinosaur did not abandon their eggs once they were laid, as modern reptiles
do.
The first convincing piece of evidence for parental care among the
dinosaurs came out in 2004 with the discovery of fossils showing that an
adult dinosaur was apparently protecting a clutch of its young when they
were all engulfed by a mudslide more than 100 million years ago.
The Chinese scientists who made the discovery said that the find
indicated a degree of parental care that went beyond simply protecting a
nest of eggs. The young psittocosaurus dinosaurs - a brood of 34 in total -
were several months old and, although physically capable of fending for
themselves, they still seemed to need their mother.
Opinions on whether dinosaurs cared for their young had to be revised
when it emerged that a dinosaur called oviraptor - named the "egg stealer"
after it was found near a clutch of eggs - was not in fact trying to eat
them but was guarding them.
Oviraptors, which lived between 80 million and 120 million years ago,
had a toothless beak and walked on two legs. They could grow up to 13ft
long and their forelimbs were armed with sharp, powerful claws. One
fossilised oviraptor, unearthed at a site in southern China, revealed that
it was about to lay two eggs. Birds lay one egg at a time, whereas reptiles
lay dozens at a sitting. Oviraptor, therefore, showed it was somewhere in
between.
"This supports the theory that oviraptor-like dinosaurs retained two
functional oviducts, like crocodiles, but had reduced the number of eggs
ovulated to one per oviduct, as in birds," said the scientists when their
study was published in 2005 in the journal Nature.
It was further evidence that dinosaurs and birds were linked. But even
stronger links were established, again by scientists in China, with the
discovery that some small, meat-eating dinosaurs grew feathers. Why they
had feathers is still open for debate. One suggestion is that they were
used initially as thermal insulation, suggesting that these creatures were
active and warm-blooded. Only later in their evolution were feathers used
aerodynamically, for flight.
Four years ago, Chinese scientists stunned the world with the
announcement they had found a feathered dinosaur with four wings.
Microraptor gui may not have been a direct ancestor of modern birds, but it
must be one of their more exotic relatives.
The question of powered flight with feathered wings centred on a
debate over whether powered flight had resulted from the ground up, or from
the trees down. One idea was that insect-chasing dinosaurs with insulating
feathers began jumping up into the air from the ground and thereby learnt
to fly.
The other was that small, feathered dinosaurs took to the trees and
learnt to glide from branch to branch, before engaging in powered flight.
Either way, the evidence seemed to be in favour of a transition from a
small, feathered dinosaur that dined on meat to the earliest common
ancestor of all modern birds.
Whether the extinction of the dinosaurs was the result of a giant
asteroid collision or the serial eruption of a network of supervolcanoes -
or both - their genes at least have lived on in the rich variety of
feathered creatures around today. So the next time you spy a blackbird on
the lawn, think about where its ancestors came from 65 million years ago.
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