Re: CHAT: browsers

En réponse à Tristan <kesuari@...>:

>
> That depends on if you're used to counting food in hundreds of grams
> or
> not, I'd think. (I think it'd be much more useful to use hectograms
> than
>   metric pounds, personally. Really, whoever decided it would be best
> to
> use multiples of 1000 (kilo-, mega-, milli- etc.) more often than the
> others was a fool.
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.

 (Yet we use hectopascals when kilopascals would
> give
> nicer numbers...
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.

 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"? 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. 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.

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).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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