Re: CHAT: browsers

Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> Probably the same person who decided to group figures in groups of three (you
> write 1 000, or 1,000 for English people) and thus gave most importance to this
> kind of groupings.
And American people. And I thought Europe did either 1.000 or 1'000, I
see them often enough. (Australians do 1 000 unless the subject is
money, when 1,000 is more common.) (Except that seperations are rare in
four-digit numbers, I imagine because these can be read as either 'three
thousand, four hundred', or 'thirty-four hundred', or because of their
similarity to years, or because a single number by itself might be lost
when there's no signal (like other groups).)

> Because 1000hPa is about 1 atmosphere, i.e. as an average the atmospheric
> pressure (1atm - the unit - is around 1012hPa IIRC). You get the thousand
> figure back again.
Ah, thanks. Strangely enough, in Chemistry, we would only talk of an
atmosphere as being 101.2 kPa, and approximable as 100 kPa.

>  I hear this is because hPa used to be called bars,
>
>>but
>>what bars have to do with the price of fish I don't know.))
>
> ?! Is that a joke on the name "bar"?
No, it's an English expression. 'What's that got to do with the price of
fish (in China)?' means 'What's that got to do with anything?'.

> IIRC "bar" originates from a last name of
> a mister Barr or something (not completely sure of this one). And hPa were
> not "bars" before. There are 1000hPa in a bar.
My mistake.

> It's just that it was common in
> meteorology to measures pressures in mbar (again this 1000 value. People seem
> to find it practical to things in thousands), and the hPa just replaced it
> while being a SI measurement unit, what the bar wasn't. Actually, there was an
> extremely small (negligible in most cases) difference between the mbar and the
> hPa, but the bar has since been redefined so that 1hPa=1mbar exactly.
Millibars aren't used here, for meteorology or otherwise (hence my
mistake)---only hectopascals.

> Actually I don't think that a single person or a comity decided to give more
> importance to thousand's prefixes (like k, m, M, etc...). They came to be
> preferred by people themselves. It seems that people find it easier to think in
> terms of thousands rather than hundreds or ten thousands. I know tons of
> examples of that (it's not for nothing that 1000kg has its own name as
> a "tonne" in French).
The Australian Style Guide recommends the use of thousands prefixes, so
it seems like someone decided it was better. And committee is spelt with
a double m, a double t and a double e.

Tristan.

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