Re: OT: Rant about degres Celsius (was: introduction)

On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Andreas Johansson wrote:

> >Firstly, I think that `centigrade' is non-standard, I've seen a number of
> >things recommending it not be used. The kelvin, joule, coulomb, watt and
> >newton (to name a few) are all named after people, but only their symbols
> >are capitalised (K, J, C, W, N). (L for litre and B for byte are also
> >exceptional in that their symbols are capitalised but they aren't derived
> >from proper nouns, but L used to be a script l and Americans don't use the
> >metric system, so how are they supposed to know about intracacies that few
> >people who _do_ use it do.
>
> "L" for litre? Here we use a simple lowecase "l" ...
I've seen them both, but the official form is `L': `Unit symbols are
expressed in lowre-cas letters excep the symbol for "litre", the symbols
for untis named after people and the symbols for units containing one of
the ... prefixes [exa, peta, tera, giga and mega]. ... The use of the
capital "L" as the symbol for "litre" is a change from earlier practice,
which was to use the lower-case "l" or script "<script l>"'. Of course, a
measurement like the litre isn't SI, so different countries may define it
and it's symbol differently (the SI unit for volume is the cubic metre
(`m^3').

> "B" for byte, possibly to differentiate from "b" for bit.
Indeed, but if it were being done SIly, it would probably be `by'.

> PS It seems to be receeding, but a couple of years ago "Kb" for kilobyte was
> extremely widespread here around. It's yet another example that the human
> mind prefers irrgularity, since the same people who wrote that unfailingly
> wrote "km" for "kilometre".
And then you have people complaining that Telstra have decided to define a
megabyte as 1024 kilobytes and a gigabyte as 1000 megabytes (or 1000
gigabytes, depending on what information you read), and yet the go and
say things like `How can Telstra decide to take a standard measurement and
define it as 1000 mb?! A gigabyte is 1024 mb!'. I'm so glad we aren't
using _their_ definition of a gigabyte for our 3 GB cap.


Tristan the pedant.

anstouh@yahoo.com.au

War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
                       - BSD Games' Fortune

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