SI &c.

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

> See the Physics Teacher this month about how 98.6 degrees got to be the
> official body temperature.

I suspect that this is just a hard conversion of 37 degrees Celsius. We
get a lot of that here in Canada, but in the opposite direction, SI
equivalents of Imperial measures. The newspapers all have metric police
who edit the evil US wire service stories so we will become comfortable
with SI. It seems to have worked here.

We had a spectacular example of hard conversion here in BC about twenty
years ago. One of the local Vancouver ski areas, Grouse Mountain Resort,
had always maintained the ronantic fiction that the mountain was 4,050
feet high when it is actually short of 4,000 feet by quite a bit (1177m
according to a mountain climbers' web site). When "metric" came in the
Grouse Mountain people were sprucing up their lower gondola station and
they built a wooden representation of the mountain with its runs,
complete with labels. The peak of Grouse Mountain was labeled with an
elevation of 123,444 centimeters, hard converted from the advertized
fictional value. (I just checked their web page. They lie even more
outrageously now and they've backslid as well, claiming an elevation of
4,100 feet! All of this is because the other two North Shore ski areas
both go well above 4,000 feet.)

One last story. In about 1960 I was donating blood in Berkeley. A
Swedish nurse was tending me. I noticed that the bottle my blood was
going into was labeled 500 cc. I commented to her that I always thought
the unit was a pint. She asked me if I was familiar with the metric
system and I said yes, I was. Finding a sympathetic ear which couldn't
just leave she decided to unburden herself of her big peeve about the
U S of A, the outrageous units in use. She said the metric system made
so much more sense. I countered that it was certainly easier to do
calculations. Then she said "...and the temperatures! When it's 20
degrees Celsius it's twice as warm as when it's 10 degrees Celsius, but
in Fahrenheit it doesn't work at all!"

I was stuck for an answer.

Leigh