I bought some Brie cheese at Costco yesterday. It was from France, but with the Kirkland (store) brand. The indication was 17.6 oz/499 g. No doubt it started out as 500 g, then got converted to 17.6 oz, then someone back-converted it to grams again.
Carleton From: Kilopascal [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, November 04, 2012 13:06 To: [email protected]; U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:51964] The foreign press does poorly on Customary/metric conversion too. Anytime you have one system and one collection of arbitrary units competing with each other there is going to be a need to convert from one to the other. Conversion mistakes will always occur, especially if the converted number is rounded. And if you have back and forth conversions, with a lot of rounding you can end up with more errors then you shake a stick at. One would think the errors would be minimal if the news agencies use on-line converters. If they convert manually, any thing can happen. The only way to stop the errors is for the media to come to an agreement to use one system (SI) universally. [USMA:51964] The foreign press does poorly on Customary/metric conversion too. John M. Steele Sat, 03 Nov 2012 04:41:47 -0700 Noticed two articles that got it pretty wrong: First, Reuters says the amount of a fuel spill is "unknown" but then quotes a third-hand Coast Guard estimate, but how about those "super-liters." I doubt NBC said anything about any liters. The good news is several commenters on the article noticed. http://news.yahoo.com/fuel-spills-waterway-between-jersey-staten-island-0129 13605--nba.html "NBC, citing the U.S. Coast Guard, said 300,000 gallons (115,000 liters) of diesel fuel had been released." This article is attributed by copyright to Deutsche Presse-Agentur. In the Kia/Hyundai fuel label scandal, it correctly reports the claim that the Kia fleet average, corrected, falls from 27 to 26 mpg. It incorrectly converts to liters per 100 kilometers, making a 3% change become a 10% change. (It also appears to mean KIA failed to meet CAFE unless they have banked credits.) http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2012/11/2/kia_hyundai_overstated_fuel_effici ency_will.htm "On average, the EPA found that both companies had overstated their efficiency by an average of 3 per cent. For the 2012 KIA fleet, this means a downgrade from 27 miles per gallon (mpg) to 26 mpg. In metric system terms, it means the fleet uses 9.6 litres per 100 kilometres instead of the claimed 8.7 liters." (To save you math, the 9.6 claim should be 9.0 L/100 km, assuming the mpg figures are correct.)
