Yes Bill it is old, I realized that after I sent. I don't know why it original showed up in Google News with today's date, but just one of the quirks of that database.
Nat From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Hooper Sent: Wednesday, 2008 July 16 10:38 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:41433] Re: Converting To The Metric System Starts With The Individual | The Onion - America's Finest News Source 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.
