Sent a few minutes ago...
Jim -------- Original Message -------- Subject: air volume in gallons? Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:11:03 -0500 From: James R. Frysinger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] What a hodge-podge of units! This article describes a new fan designed by James Dyson that moves "119 gallons" of air per second. It employs, the article states, slits that are 1.3 mm wide. "Inventor James Dyson's Ingenious Bladeless Fan" http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,565401,00.html I'm confident that the actual air flow value the authors were given by Dyson was 450 L/s and those journalists inexplicably converted that to gallons. Maybe we're lucky they didn't convert that figure to bushels. This is yet another silly result of a compulsion journalists have to convert perfectly fine metric units to non-metric. They must think that viewers of the FoxNews.com site have never seen carbonated beverages sold in 1 L and 2 L bottles. I just wonder why they didn't convert the figure of 1.3 mm to fractions of a yard or fathom. I know that journalists are infamous for being innumerate, excepting those reporting in fiscal matters, and thus weak on metric units but I especially would have expected the SciTech journalists to be able to understand what a liter is. Please advise them that Americans handle the common metric units quite easily. They do not need to have those simple metric units converted to non-metric units. Thank you. James R. Frysinger -- James R. Frysinger 632 Stony Point Mountain Road Doyle, TN 38559-3030 (C) 931.212.0267 (H) 931.657.3107 (F) 931.657.3108 -- James R. Frysinger 632 Stony Point Mountain Road Doyle, TN 38559-3030 (C) 931.212.0267 (H) 931.657.3107 (F) 931.657.3108
