Wrong units conversion in press

[Redbelly98]

It really annoys me when professionals mess up unit conversions.

From http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090403/sc_afp/usclimatewarming_20090403144320

"The amount of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at the end of summer by then could be only about 1 million square kilometers, or about 620,000 square miles," said US researchers who authored the study published Thursday.

(1 million km^2 is actually 390,000 square miles.)

 

[mgb_phys]

My personal one is the unnecessary number of decimal places (especially here in metric land)
I just bought a barbecue that warns me to keep it 182.8cm (6ft?) away from flammable materials.

 

[Redbelly98]

EDIT: responding to deleted post.

The conversion is not between km and miles, rather it is between square km and square miles.

1 million km^2 = (1000 km) x (1000 km)
= (621 miles) x (621 miles)
= 621 x 621 miles^2
= 385,000 sq. miles

It's a common enough error for science students, not to square the length conversion factor in order to get to get area. Just a little irksome when professionals do this.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I just bought a barbecue that warns me to keep it 182.8cm (6ft?) away from flammable materials.

LOL, that's funny!

I swear I would fall over if a local news agency ever grasped the difference between kWs, and kW-Hrs. Any time I see a story about the price of electricity, they always cite the price in cents per kW.

 

[Ben Niehoff]

I'd buy a kW for $100 if I could keep it for the rest of my life.

 

[Proton Soup]

if only they had googled it, first

http://www.google.com/search?q=1+mi...=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

 

[rootX]

if only they had googled it, first

http://www.google.com/search?q=1+mi...=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

I was also thinking about google... and this monday xkcd

http://www.xkcd.com/563/

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town

 

[Redbelly98]

BTW, the way I read the article from post #1, it is the scientists and not the reporter who made the error.

The same mistake is given on NOAA's website
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090402_seaice.html

I reported the mistake to them; we'll see if there's a correction or do they just write me off as some anally retentive geek from the fringes of society. Well, at least they did acknowledge receiving my email.

if only they had googled it, first

http://www.google.com/search?q=1+mi...=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

That's exactly what I did. Had to be sure, after all.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It really annoys me when professionals mess up unit conversions.

October 01, 1999

NASA lost its $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter because spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements when exchanging vital data before the craft was launched, space agency officials said Thursday.

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/01/news/mn-17288

 

[Proton Soup]

noaa article seems to be fixed already

 

[Pengwuino]

I'd buy a kW for $100 if I could keep it for the rest of my life.

I'll sell you a kW but only for 5 seconds.

 

[Redbelly98]

noaa article seems to be fixed already

You're right. It was mistaken earlier (within 1/2 hour of 1st post in this thread). When I went back later and saw the same date there, 2 Apr 2009, I just assumed it had not been corrected yet.

Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There was a piece on Antarctic warming where they said that the temperature had been increasing 32.2 F per year for the last decade.

I'm pretty sure they meant "increasing 0.1 C per year"