On Jul 15 , at 6:05 PM, Nat Hager III wrote:
The Onion gets into the act…..
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/34024
This was nothing new. It's an oldie from 2004. Furthermore, it's not
really very good.
The author claims to believe that metric is easier but her examples
make it seem anything but easier.
She suggests advertizing a rental apartment as having 79.965 square
metres of floor space. That would seem to be an overly precise
conversion of 860 sq. ft. If she did make that calculation, she should
have rounded off the result to something more like 80 square metres.
She also suggests changing the phrase "More bounce to the ounce" to
"More bounce to the 1.6 grams"! How silly! (And wrong!)
A more creative way would be to change it to something like "More bam
to the gram". She apparently just tried to do an exact, calculated
conversion from ounces to grams and she didn't even do that right!
(One ounce actually equals 28.35 grams. Her 1.6 grams wasn't even
close.)
I wonder whether the article was, instead, a tongue-in-cheek, anti-
metric piece claiming (facetiously) to be favoring metric while giving
examples to show that her claims of simplicity were actually
complicated.
Bill Hooper
73 kg body mass*
Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
* plus or minus a kilogram or so.
