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Dam units conversion

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Dr J R Stockton

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Feb 15, 2012, 6:08:50 AM2/15/12
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<http://www.agu.org/news/press/jhighlight_archives/2012/2012-02-14.shtml>
contains "in 1977 the 8-mile (13-kilometer) high Kelly Barnes Lake dam
failed".

Given the proportion of the US population that has immigrated from metric
countries, or served in the metricated armed services, or travelled by
road outside North America, one would have hoped that press offices would
be able to find staff with some idea of the size of a kilometer.

--
(c) John Stockton, nr London, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v6.05.
Website <http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - w. FAQish topics, links, acronyms
PAS EXE etc. : <http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/> - see in 00index.htm
Dates - miscdate.htm estrdate.htm js-dates.htm pas-time.htm critdate.htm etc.

Paul Stoffers

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Feb 18, 2012, 10:14:02 AM2/18/12
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Dr J R Stockton <repl...@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> <http://www.agu.org/news/press/jhighlight_archives/2012/2012-02-14.shtml>
> contains "in 1977 the 8-mile (13-kilometer) high Kelly Barnes Lake dam
> failed".
>
> Given the proportion of the US population that has immigrated from
> metric countries, or served in the metricated armed services, or
> travelled by road outside North America, one would have hoped that
> press offices would be able to find staff with some idea of the size
> of a kilometer.

Especially since the article is about 'small dams'

I tried to figure out what's the matter here:

- an /8 mile/ high dam should make US editors suspicious even if they
didn't know what a km is
- the website is US in origin, providing an abstract of an artical of
AU origin
- I can't read the original full article (well, I'm not willing to pay
for it...)

Since the article is about /small/ dams, am I correct in assuming the
Australians authors used metric units and the dam is 8 m high; and some
US editor thought that 8 m = 8 miles? Small dam indeed!

I just checked wikipediaą and they claim the dam was 12 m high, and
other sites˛ ł claim the dam was 38 feet or 40 feet (which both are
roughly equal to 12 m)

So did the Australians just roughly convert 39 feet to 13 m? And if so,
did they actually use 13 m in their article, or maybe, by mistake an
extra k has been typed, resulting in '13 km'?

In any case, it's very strange indeed that an editor for an 'American
Geophysical Union' website didn't notice.

Does anyone feel inclined to tell them?

Paul

ą) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Barnes_Dam
2)
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/publications/ToccoaFIBReport/body1.html#description
ł) http://pubs.usgs.gov/ha/ha613/




--- Posted via news://freenews.netfront.net/ - Complaints to ne...@netfront.net ---

Dr J R Stockton

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Feb 19, 2012, 3:04:01 PM2/19/12
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In misc.metric-system message <jhof8h$1e02$1...@adenine.netfront.net>, Sat,
18 Feb 2012 16:14:02, Paul Stoffers <pst_...@hetnet.nl> posted:

>Dr J R Stockton <repl...@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> <http://www.agu.org/news/press/jhighlight_archives/2012/2012-02-14.shtml>
>> contains "in 1977 the 8-mile (13-kilometer) high Kelly Barnes Lake dam
>> failed".
>>
>> Given the proportion of the US population that has immigrated from
>> metric countries, or served in the metricated armed services, or
>> travelled by road outside North America, one would have hoped that
>> press offices would be able to find staff with some idea of the size
>> of a kilometer.
>
>Especially since the article is about 'small dams'
>
>I tried to figure out what's the matter here:
>
>- an /8 mile/ high dam should make US editors suspicious even if they
>didn't know what a km is
>- the website is US in origin, providing an abstract of an artical of
>AU origin
>- I can't read the original full article (well, I'm not willing to pay
>for it...)
>
>Since the article is about /small/ dams, am I correct in assuming the
>Australians authors used metric units and the dam is 8 m high; and some
>US editor thought that 8 m = 8 miles? Small dam indeed!

I found a more original looking version which gave the height as 8 m.

Wikipedia says that the height of the dam had been increased twice.

>In any case, it's very strange indeed that an editor for an 'American
>Geophysical Union' website didn't notice.
>
>Does anyone feel inclined to tell them?

IIRC, I did.

Joerg Eisentraeger

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Feb 20, 2012, 1:34:00 PM2/20/12
to
On Sat, 18 Feb 2012 16:14:02 +0100, "Paul Stoffers" <pst_...@hetnet.nl>
wrote:

>Does anyone feel inclined to tell them?

I did too.

Peter Weiss, Public Information Manager of AGU, allowed me to publish
his answer here:

" ... Thank you very much for pointing out our blunder. Apparently, a
unit given as "m" for meters got translated into "miles" (and then
"kilometers") when the article got repackaged for press distribution
(the version that gets posted on AGU's News Room web pages. Please see
the following link for the article as it appears --correctly, I might
add -- on the journal's website:
http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/highlights/highlights.cgi?action=show&doi=10.1029/2011WR011155&jc=wr
).
The repackaging is pretty much a mechanical process (unlike the actual
writing of the article), but that's really no excuse for our not having
performed a reality check as the unit was converted from an abbreviation
into something fully named. Although we can't fix this over the weekend,
we will make certain it gets corrected on Monday.
Many thanks again for calling our attention to the error (which for me
is troubling, but also so absurd that I couldn't help but laugh at the
thought of such a ridiculously huge dam -- you too?) ..."

They have fixed it in the meantime.


Greetings from Germany
Joerg
--
http://www.joergei.de/
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