It's been touched on in this dialogue, but it deserves more emphasis. The reason the distances in the swimming and track events have not been dumbed down is that they are part of the name of the event. And, for the swimming, the length of a lap is exactly 50 m. In such cases, it's almost impossible for even the most diehard adherent of the old units to use them. Even they can grasp how stupid it would sound.
In such events, the only significant variable is time, for which the unit is the same either way. For all the others, it appears that NBC has remained a slave to AP Style, which is something we've universally condemned on this list. I suspect that the reactionary AP people who make the decisions on style were displaced by people with a strong scientific background, we'd see a change in both AP and NBC. Note the balance beam definition at http://www.answers.com/topic/balance-beam. Although it supplies US customary equivalents (parenthetically), the primary units are SI. While you are there, scroll down to the "apparatus" heading in the Wikipedia definition. Same thing. Maybe such references would be useful in correspondence with the likes of AP and NBC -- just to show them that the average Internet user is seeing the SI values in preference to the very awkward conversions -- and is thus very familiar with them. (A Venn diagram of Internet users and viewers of the Olympics on NBC would, I suspect, exhibit something like ninety percent overlap.) In the meantime, the word "pigheaded" keeps springing to mind. Bill ________________________________ Bill Potts WFP Consulting Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
