It never occurred to me that folks might have trouble remembering which was X and which was Y. Good thing I never taught analytic geometry, eh?
Perhaps it was because I learned the number line first. Then when we added a second line running up and down, the first line was "x" and the second line was "y". And when we added a third line coming straight out of the paper, that was z. I presume that when they added a fourth line for time, that could be T, but now that the universe has at least seven dimensions, I haven't the foggiest what they do. It wasn't mentioned in the thread I read on SF.fandom, where various engineers were complaining that other engineers used the wrong conventions. -1^-2, for example, is "i" everywhere except in electrical engineering, where it's "j", to distinguish it from current. "i" and "j" never bugged me -- I'm too aware that "j" is a variant form of "i" -- but I learned that they *swap* some conventions: what should be theta is phi, and what should be phi is theta. That would be a much bigger hassle than variations on the BCC ever thought about being! It could crash a spaceship, now that you mention it . . . -- Joy Beeson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's cold and wet. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
