On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 19:01:00 -0700, Patrick Chew
<patchew@...> wrote:

> "widely understood term"... once again, it comes down to that "Lowest
> Common Denominator" business, if a community that specializes in a
> subject has particular parlance with its issues, etc. and has controversy
> or dissatisfaction with terminology or jargon regarding said field,
> shouldn't they be the ones to spur the movement to correct such
> inconsistencies or inaccuracies? or at least to provide rationale for
> otherwise non-conventionalized (in the mainstream) use?

In my own field, electronics, the USA eventually joined the rest of the
world,
learning to use Hertz (Hz) instead of cycles per second (cps) (often just
called "cycles" (c)). We also eventually adopted the prefix "pico" (p) to
replace a doubled "micro", conventionally represented as "µµ", or even
"mm".

The distinction between caps and l.c. (small?) is quite important in
writing
scientific and engineering units and prefixes for powers of ten. The
uninformed
or careless computer ads and texts that say, e.g., "The processor runs at
600 mhz"
are really referring to 600 millihertz, 600/1000 (0.6) hz. Truly few know
how
clueless they look. ("MHz" is correct.) Fwiw, millihertz is a legitimate
unit;
even microhertz, as well, though both are rare.

There's a whole set of letter prefixes for powers of ten. For instance,
[m] (milli) signifies 1/1000, for instance, as in the first "m"
of "mm", "millimeter". M, mega, signifies 1,000,000.

There's a nice reference at <http://www.linux.gr/cgi-bin/man2html?units+7>
which doesn't give the linguistic origins. The "binary powers of ten" you
can probably safely ignore, although it's good to know if you
bump up against them sometime.
See <http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/prefixes.htm> for some linguistic
origins.

(The inconsistent [k] and [h] are small to avoid confusion with K (degrees
kelvin)
and H (inductance in henries).)

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Massachusetts
Using Opera 7.11 -- An excellent browser
--
Also using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client