I've just listened to ?The life scientific? (R4). Jim Al-Khalili let himself down badly.
On the subject of sea level rises due to global warming he said, "That?s very scary. A metres of sea level rise [per century] would put most of England under water".
Rubbish. Three metres by 2300AD does not mean ?most of England? would be under water at all. Low lying areas would be flooded but otherwise the coastline would remain broadly the same. And this would be in 300 years time.
Bill
It also ignores the fact that Southern England is sinking anyway.
I like J-a-K, he's an engaging presenter who can sell science. But I was disappointed beyond consoling when I watched his Secrets of Quantum Physics, and had to hear him use "feet" when describing lengths. Especially when he then used metric units elsewhere. I could hear my science teachers screaming at me about mixing units.
why do people get so excitable over trivia
NT
You wait till someone mixes up inches and centimetres :)
I didn't think this country had decided to go totally metric as yet. My best measurement that you'd hate would be that light travels at about 1 foot per nano-second.
:)
Welllllll ....
My schooling was totally metric, so surely people younger than me should be natively conversant ? We're not Americans you know (remembers episode of Mythbusters that visited NASA to try out their wind tunnel. The machine was etched with the units feet/second).
I don't mind feet/nano-second so much. It was JaK saying "about 20 feet long" in one part of the programme, and then using centi/milli-metres in another. It's like take 300g of flour and add 1/2 pint of milk ...
(As an aside, people who mix up units on recipes are gambling a bit ... the values are consistent across systems, but slightly different - e.g. half a pint is not 250ml. 8oz is not 250g)
With respect, the higher seas would increase erosion and a lot more ground would be lost. at least that is apparently what they say will happen. I guess it depends on whether we try to mitigate it before hand or decide to sacrifice unsustainable areas. after all, its not just the coastline its the rivers as well. Brian
On a carton of dried milk the units for reconstitution had 4%w/v for one and
5%w/v for t'other - a 25% error!
Mine was tediously Imperial with weights in T,cwt,q,st,lb,oz etc. On the plus side it made octal and hexadecimal seem more natural.
I find miles/litre a particularly handy hybrid unit for computing my cars fuel economy - it comes out at about 13 on a good day (~60mpg).
UK odometers are calibrated in miles but fuel delivery in litres.
which isnt a problem
Its not gambling, its simply a mistake to think that recipes are or need be that accurate.
The problem is fools insisting people should only learn one of the 2 big systems of measurement in widespread use, and people wetting themselves over other people using one of both systems. All very silly.
NT
As a school pupil I found one foot per nanosecond quite easy to grasp. It's only an approximation after all. Now if it had been twelve attoparsecs per femtofortnight...
I smarted a little when I heard an American describing the amount of water draining into a reservoir in units of acre-feet.
What would you suggest they mesure the speed their cars are travleing at then considering the road signs are all imperial measurements.
etched implies they are old so it doesn't suprise me. if you said teh LCD displays was in ft/sec that would be suprising, but understandable as they are americans ;-)
Here I keep asking the academics to use the term 4mm plugs rather than banana plugs.
I still by pints of beer in teh pub and when in the supermarket I buy the same beer in 500ml bottles. Unfortunanlty I think we'll be stuck with this for many many years to come.
then there's diffrecies betwwen the US and UK with imperial.
The one I don't like is C & F I prefer C but so many people use F especailly in the summer when it suites them to describe hot weather.
I do hope the global warming teams havent got that confused like NASA did with polar lander with feet and metres.
_Some_ recipes needn't be that precise. But for _repeatable_ results in baking, precision _does_ matter.
The point is its a matter of how much precision
An equivalent /very/ expensive mistake has already been made:
Havn't caught that one yet, but that does seem surprising. I do think he is normally one of the better science presenters, and the TLS interviews are almost invariably very interesting.
There's map on here
It seems half of the Netherlands would be in deep do-do after 3 decades but not the UK. Here it would mainly be the sort of places where they already marry their sisters (allegedly) in any case.
michael adams
...
Don't forget that a lot of that part of the Netherlands is already reclaimed land maintained by pumping stations. ISTR that Dutch engineers were also responsible for reclaiming a lot around the Wash and Ely.
NO, NO, NO!
It's their Mothers that they marry; their sisters are their daughters!
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