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BBC invents new SI unit

BBC News reports: “The Mars Phoenix lander touched down … after a 680-million-km journey”.

I’m amused by “million kilometre” as a unit of measurement. What happened to the gigametre? Why mix french and greek? Perhaps this is actually a clever new idea. We could start measuring hard disk capacity like “350 million kilobytes” to emphasise just how mindbogglngly large they are.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 3:29 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “BBC invents new SI unit”

  1. Claire Says:
    May 27th, 2008 at 9:30 am

    It’s all part of the BBC’s helpful strategy of taking easily understandable news stories and reporting them in such simple terms that they lose all meaning :-)

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