Why Do Media Outlets Often Get Unit Conversions Wrong?

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Redbelly98
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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.)
 
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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.
 
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.
 
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mgb_phys said:
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.
 
Proton Soup said:
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/

fermirotica.png

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

Proton Soup said:
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.
 
Redbelly98 said:
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
 
noaa article seems to be fixed already
 
Ben Niehoff said:
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.