On Thu, 28 Mar 2002 19:08:48 Bill Potts wrote: ... >Is it all right if we tell you to consume the water at an average rate of 23 >microliters per second (23 5L/s)? > >Even though this isn't realistic as a set of instructions, it illustrates >the concept of normalization, where the denominator in the expression is >unity (i.e., 1 of something, requiring only the unit's symbol). > The above is a very interesting observation. IMHO when it comes to presentation of ratios and other things one should strive to state them in the original basic units. However, if one is delving into "nanotechnology" territory or "macro", one may have to resort to other prefixes to adequately address them. In any case, I'd say that the choice of these prefixes should fall on the more "commonly" used ones. Therefore, evidently the above would be quite... unconventional... :-)
>There's a very common exception -- L/100 km. (Price/100 g is not, of course, >an exception, as currency units are not SI.) >... Now, here I have some trouble with the above. To me one can *always* find adequate ratio ranges that would stick with existing prefixes, and clearly L/100 km simply does not follow that principle (and also another reason why I personally dislike this ratio quite a bit, I'd rather use km/L, but that discussion has been done here to death so I won't rekindle it). But as for the other ratio I also disagree a little bit. First, because currency could be treated as just any other ordinary unit, and second because we do have a prefix for 100, the h. Therefore, I see nothing wrong in using $/hg. Cheers, Marcus See Dave Matthews Band live or win a signed guitar http://r.lycos.com/r/bmgfly_mail_dmb/http://win.ipromotions.com/lycos_020201/splash.asp
