I wonder if Discovery has a guideline or standard practice for shows they buy or produce with regard to units of measure.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-u...@colostate.edu [mailto:owner-u...@colostate.edu] On Behalf Of c...@traditio.com Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 2:48 PM To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:52705] Why the Inconsistency? The Science Channel, which is a part of the Discovery complex, ran a "How It's Made Program" last night. From the credits at the end, at least this episode was produced in Canada. I was curious to see how it would run in the United States. The program, in the segment on the mining of silver ore, always used kilograms instead of pounds. There was a close-up of a scale, which displayed a reading in "mg". But a distance was given in inches. These persistent inconsistences (as Canada certainly uses millimetres or centimetres) are quite perplexing. I could understand an all-metric program or an all non-metric program, dumbed down for the United States. Another program, on astronomy, talked about astronomical distances in miles (where it hardly mattered for the common perception), but shorter distances (such as for the size of a meteor) in metres. It has always perplexed me why these programs are so inconsisent. In a curious way, it confirms my approach that the United States is *not* a non-metric country. It is a country stuck in the middle of conversion, not unlike England and even Canada. Martin Morrison Training and SI Columnist, "Metric Today"
