(voiceover while a Spanish farmer is holding a placard showing 871,2 Kg*)
“Just before slaughter, the cow weighed in at 8,712 Kilograms. That’s 2,866 pounds!”
No it doesn’t–that’s not a possible cow mass; no, that’s not the weight-in-pounds equivalent of that mass; and yes, you and not your flunky are responsible for the accuracy of your own story. The least you could do is get the conversion right and recognize that either that comma is the same thing as your decimal point or else 19000 pounds or so is a titchy bit big for a cow. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/28793341#28793341
*I am not docking her for mass v weight; in ordinary usage, that’s just fine.
The closest conversion rate to the numbers given by the reporter would be converting meters to feet. Even that’s not going to get exactly 2,866.
Seriously, where did they get that number?
Yesterday I was watching the news at lunch. In chinatown a van hit 5 school children, two of which died. The news reporter said, “The driver apparently fell asleep at the wheel and jumped the curb, immediately killing one of the children. Of course, we don’t actually know this, but this is our speculation of what is happening in chinatown.” :eek::mad:
So you don’t actually know what happened, except that a van hit a group of kids, so you are going to extrapolate from this that the driver (apparently there was no driver and the van wasn’t parked properly, causing it to roll backwards and up the curb into the children according to the paper this morning) fell asleep and killed a child. So you are basically just making up news as you go along. Nice job, asshole.
That’s a big friggin’ cow. I think we can just chalk that one up to people not listening to themselves or giving any thought to what they’re saying. Or they could just be really stupid. Hard to say.
Jim and I like to listen to news and commercials critically and mock them. It’s a hobby.
I get so sick of reporters letting politicians off the hook in interviews, missing the most obvious of questions or rebuttals. Sometimes I wish Louis Theroux was doing the interviews; at least he has a bit of bottle when it comes to asking the hard questions.
They saw the number of the placard, and presumably someone then said, “Hey, we need to convert this number to ‘pounds’ so that American audiences will understand it.”
And then not only did they read the actual number wrong, concluding that the cow weighed 8,712kg rather than 871.2kg, but the conversion the did bore no resemblance to either number. As the OP points out, 8,712kg would be about 19,000 pounds, and 871.2kg would be just over 1,900 pounds. The 2,866 pound number they got bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of the numbers they were using.
I’m 40 (that’s 48 metric) and I have no idea what the conversion is. Mostly because I rarely have any reason to convert pounds or kilograms. Nanometers is more up my alley… Haven’t thought about kilos since I quit drugs in 1986.
I don’t know many metric/imperial conversions - that’s what my bookmarked website is for (I have to have one to talk to you 'Murkins and your stubborn insistence on not joining the rest of the world).
I know pounds and kilos, inches and centimeters, yards and meters, gallons and liters, kilometers and miles well enough to approximate. I always look them up when I need to be precise, though. Don’t know 'em that well.
If you want to talk about goofy things reporters do, go on YouTube and search for “CNN nice melons.”