Metric Significant Figures

by Stephan Logan

Significant metric by Stephan Logan

It never ceases to amaze me how journalism students can graduate without the faintest understanding of the metric system or what significant digits are. Virtually everything published in one well-known Canadian paper, that has just a hint of metric in it is invariably completely wrong. Today's column was an exception but ironically the author's source of information was a US government department!

The paper's back page is consistently incompetent; especially ironic since the writer frequently runs a "Significant Digits" subsection. Today's effort: "an ounce of moisture fitting a 1/3 of a teacup". What is that? I like a big cup of tea but others prefer those dinky Oriental-style vessels! Recently, they reported that the City of Toronto can only pump 1.2 million litres a day, around 0.5 litre per city dweller, & said it would fill Skydome (a 60,000 seat stadium). Sorry, but that's only 1200 cubic metres and about the same volume as a nice-sized house.

A few weeks ago the air cargo crash in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was reported as having a cargo weight of 53,305kg. They report the value accurate to within 5kg, yet an accompanying article indicated no one knew the exact weight! Given that the paper is an important source of complex financial information, can we be sure any of it is correct when the writers cannot even master millimetres?"

This short article was contributed by sciencebase sponsor Stephan Logan of Indigo® Instruments suppliers of molecular models.

Back to the sciencebase.com home page