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28 October 2011
What's your number? There are around 7 billion people on the planet today. According to this site, when I was born, I was the 3,308,901,131st person alive on Earth.
Oh, yeah. We get this a lot here in Canada with news stories taken from wire services or whatever. They translate the units into SI metric with no thought given to significant digits.
So a phrase like "The rocket was travelling at approximately 1,000 MPH" gets published here as "The rocket was travelling at approximately 1,609.344 km/h" and that just makes me squint when I see it.
It gets even worse when they do this with common expressions. I have seen "We should have seen this problem coming 1.609 kilometers away." as a direct quote from somebody in a news story.