[USMA:52586] Nova's Bad Metrics

[csm]

The latest Nova science program on PBS is "Meteor Impact," a study of the 
recent crash of a meteor in Russia.  It was remarkable how badly Nova, 
which is supposed to be one of the best television science programs, 
handled measurements.

First off, the scientists couldn't standardize on the pronunciation of the 
unit "kilometer," with the accent on the first syllable, the prefix. 
Probably this occurred because most in the U.S. use the deprected 
pronunciation to rhyme with "thermometer," whereas the Canadian scientists 
on the program used the proper pronunciation.

What was most annoying, however, was that the scientists in virtually 
every case used kilometers and meters.  Rather than just letting that 
stand, Nova's narrator was constantly "translating" metric measurements 
into miles and feet.  Scientist:  "The object was fifty meters in 
diameter."  Narrator:  "That's 165 feet in diameter."

Frankly, I don't think most viewers would really absorb either 50 meters 
or 165 feet, so the program might just as well have saved time and 
confusion, and let the metric measurement stand without "translation."