[USMA:52587] Re: Nova's Bad Metrics

[Henschel Mark]

Did you also notice that Nova could not tell the difference between a meteor, asteroid and comet?
They used all three terms as if they were all the same thing. The only thing they got right was meteorite, once the rock hits the planet Earth.
 
But there is a big difference between a dirty snowball (comet) and a rock or chunk of metal (meteor).
The meteor will leave bits and pieces behind -chunk buried in the ground will be a meteorite, but an asteroid consisting of snow and ice will basically blow up in a steam explosion so that there will be essentually nothing left. That is the difference between Cherblynsk and Tanguska.
We use the term asteriod belt, but the asteriod belt consists of many types of rocks and snowballs, NOVA could not seem to understand that different objects behave differently when entering the atmosphere at 17 kilometers per second (which they also translated into miles per hour)
 
Mark
----- Original Message -----
From: c...@traditio.com
Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2013 12:07 pm
Subject: [USMA:52586] Nova's Bad Metrics
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu>

> 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."
>