Dr. Ray L. Winstead
Professor of Biology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Winstead's BBC Interview about Metric Time


         On Wednesday February 14, 2001 I received an unexpected telephone call: "BBC London Calling." On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of England's "Decimal Day" February 15, 1971 when England started the "decimalisation" process for many of its measures, the premier BBC radio programme "Today" planned to commemorate that day with a story about metrics. They did a search of the Internet for metric time, found my percentage metric time clock web page, and called me to set up an interview for later in the day. My interview with featured "Presenter" Jim Naughtie was prerecorded one hour before airtime (Midnight my time and 5:00am (conventional time) their time). When the three-hour programme started at 6:00am Jim Naughtie opened the programme with a couple of news headlines and then told the listeners that later in the programme they would be hearing from "The Metric Man" who says that this is not really six O'clock but 25 O'clock. In the last fifteen minutes of the three-hour programme they aired the segment about metrics. Former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath was interviewed about the topic for about 4 minutes, since he was Prime Minister on "Decimal Day," and then my 3 minute interview about metric time was aired.
         I have received permission from the BBC Today Programme to offer the interview here as long as I acknowledge that the interview is from the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme with a link to their web site: BBC Today Programme.  (I also recommend BBC Radio 3 to you for a variety of online music.)  
Hear my BBC interview:

  I. Hear intro promo and my entire interview via STREAMING AUDIO
MP3 format in Windows Media Player:
Click start arrow in player below.
 

II.  Click here to hear intro promo and my entire interview via STREAMING AUDIO
        ("REAL" format; 3 minutes, 36 seconds; RealPlayer pop-up window).
Note: The newest RealOne Player (actually version 9) does not seem to work as well as RealPlayer 8 
(after much testing of both on different computers),  e.g. too many interruptions of the streaming 
audio in RealOne Player in comparison to the smooth streaming audio of RealPlayer 8, so if you want 
your RealPlayer 8 back again (at least until RealOne is "fixed" and regardless of other possible 
advertised advantages of RealOne Player), then you can 
download the setup for RealPlayer 8 on the next page.
p.s. - see user reviews of RealOnePlayer at www.cnet.com.

 III. Download interview segments in MP3 format.
1. "Metric Man" intro promo at beginning of programme (8.0 seconds, 124KB).
2. Jim Naughtie's interview introduction - "Esperanto"1 (31.6 seconds, 493KB).
3. "I believe . . ."(32.4 seconds, 505KB).
4. Definitions (48.8 seconds, 762KB).
5. Change - "going to happen" (39.6 seconds, 618KB).
6. "One world society as far as time is concerned." Napoleon (55.2 seconds, 862KB).
3. 

My part in the interview was certainly not all that great, but the fact that they called me, interviewed me, and aired the interview, of course, was an exciting event for me.

    footnote 1. - Esperanto is an artificial language designed and proposed by Russian L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be an international medium, based on words and forms common to the principal European languages.


 
Front Page

Dr. Winstead's Biology Careers and Job Searches Starting Point
Dr. Winstead's Current Local and World Standard Percentage Metric Time Clock
Dr. Winstead's Nintendo DS Battery Indicator Light Solution for Color Blind (Color Deficient) Users
Dr. Winstead's Blood Pressure Tracker:  Free Templates for Graphing Blood Pressure in Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc
 Dr. Winstead's Pill Rememberer TM Memory Aid for Tracking Pills

Dr. Ray L. Winstead
Direct e-mail Link: RWinstea@iup.edu