It's not just the BBC, it's the UK as a whole. Miles per hour or deeply entrenched for speeds but for measurements we use meters. The same for weight, we weigh people in stone but we weigh everything else with grams.
replyWe even weigh different kinds of drugs differently. So I'm told.
replyI remember reading about whales returning to an area they hadn't been in for decades and people were worried about them eating all the local fish, but in fact their faeces enriched the local ecosystem from the ground up, leading to more fish. It's a bit like the counter-arguments to the lump of labour fallacy.
replyI think the BBC policy is to provide every measurement in both types of unit.
replyOrdering is inconsistent.
replyThey use MPH in the UK.
replyTheir hours are pegged to the hogshead, and are about 3 seconds shorter than American hours.
replyThe US use of units is worse than the UK.
replySaid from a proudly metric country, New Zealand, where everyone knows their weight in kilograms and height in feet and inches.
at least it's not stones
replyThe metric system is the tool of the Devil! My Tesla gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
replyIs it also their policy to botch the significant digits? 300 mph is obviously a crude estimate. Converting to 483 km/h implies an unreasonable degree of precision.
replyApparently they also measurably affect the vertical water mixing. Fish need dissolved oxygen to breathe, so they don't normally venture past the thermocline. And their fins are also vertical, so they don't cause a lot of vertical water movement.
replyBut whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
deleted
replyAnimals do these things. Bears eat berries and then poop out the seeds, complete with fertilizer. It happens up and down the food chain.
replydeleted
reply