Today while I was visiting the gym I noticed that the eliptical machines now
had color touchscreen panels on them. The first thing I noticed was it had
an iPod dock so I could control my playlists by tapping the screen and
setting the song I wanted and listening through a headphone jack. But as I
was using it I noticed that the distance units could be set to kilometers
and the speed to kilometers per hour. I was originally confused because on
the screen it shows an imaginary track oval and you as a little dot running
along towards the finish line, but the finish line seemed to make no sense
in miles until I switched it to meters and discovered that the "track" was a
standard 400m oval marked off every 100m.
Needless to say I was happy to have at least part of my workout fully metric
:). The second instance I noticed was Fox news was interviewing the Boy
Scouts who survived a tornado striking their camp earlier this week and when
one of the news anchors asked one of the boys how far away he thought the
tornado was from his position the boy replied that he thought it was about
500 meters, and seemed quite comfortable using meters to describe distance.
It's nice to see a couple more instances of the USA's slow but inevitable
transition towards the SI.
Mike
--
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