Thanks, Joe, for sharing this very opportune survey. I just have some few additional remarks to make on this subject.
For starters, I find it important for all of us to remember that we should not consider the treatment of prefixed units as being "another unit". Some of us either unwillingly or for some other reason, tradition, "culture"... (and I'm not saying this is the particular case of anyone who ever participated in this discussion!) appear to think that any and all prefixed units constitute *different* units in themselves. A typical example of this behavior was that Professor here in my own back yard who insisted in talking about "conversion factors" (a huge SIC!) between several SI prefixed units. As long as some may have this approach concerning centi or milli we may have a loooong way to go before we could settle this. While in the minds of some there may be "difficulties" related to "navigating" around differing prefixes the fact of the matter is their introduction and diversity can be adequately addressed if stakeholders involved with this adopted the simple effective procedure of treating them as "the third entity" in calculations (the power of 10 component), as it *always should*, actually! I know that this may be hard to ask since it would involve getting people "unused" to doing calcs a certain way, but, ultimately, I honestly see no other effective way of handling this issue. It's either this or continue to upset people by polarizing in favor of one approach over the other (and in the end, I honestly think NOBODY wins really!). Evidently, it goes without saying that where there is no need to do this (when, for instance, all units involved are of the same expected nature) one can dispense with this 3rd entity business in practice. Having said the above I'd like to hereby propose that we alert authorities to this simple but effective approach to address this thing for once and for all. Hopefully when it comes to teaching our next generations this would be part of all countries educational systems. I realize that this may be somewhat harder to do than to lobby people to stick with one specific prefix. But I'd like to believe that this idea would be welcome because it would "introduce" a procedure for the treatment of equations, calcs, etc that not only does work but also mitigates current potential operational difficulties involved with camps using diverse prefixes. If adopted people will finally no longer lose their sleep over whether camps talking are using c or m or whatever else. Diversity would be respected while with time people would have a better chance in a calmer environment to slowly *but safely* migrate to more preferred prefixes or something where "standardization" would bring clear economies of scale to all involved. It's important though for all of us to understand and accept that we will *NEVER* achieve complete universality in the use of specific prefixes. This IMHO is next to impossible due to the very diverse nature of different applications. A striking example is nanotechnology versus so-called heavy industries. One using (and I'm afraid always will!) nano, femto, while the other kilo, mega or even higher. So, in summary, the proposal is for the creation of a permanent 3rd entity (power of 10) *as an integral part* of the measured value to be incorporated for all math-related operations (software, manual calcs, etc). This can be regarded as a precautionary measure as this "new field" may not be used if all entities involved in the calcs were of "cancelling" nature (i.e. results would come in expected format). In other words depending on the industry this "field" could be entirely ignored, so that the apparent "extra" work/cost of introducing this would effectively not be a player. There, I hope all of you will view this humble suggestion as a definitive way of dealing with this issue. Thanks for your time. Marcus On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 22:15:07 Joseph B. Reid wrote: >Marcus, in USMA 21377, wrote a strong rebuttal of USMA 21374 in which I >presented the South African case for the use of the millimetre in >engineering and architectural drawings. Albert J. Mettler carried out an >internatioinal survey of metric practice in 1976. Albert, with a Swiss >background, farvored the centimetre but reported: > > Countries not using the centimetre > engineers architects >Europe > Austria 1) X > Czechoslovakia X > Denmark 1) X X > Germany X > Greece X > Hungary X > Italy X > Luxemburg X X > Norway 1) X X > Poland X > Sweden 1) X > Switzerland X > Yugoslavia X >Africa > Botswana 2) X X > Cameroon x X > Mauritius 2) X X > South Africa 2) X X > Sudan X X > Zimbabwe 2) X X >Asia > Cyprus X > India X > Iraq X > Philippines X >Central America > Cuba X X > El Salvador X > >1) standards institutes with rather puristic approach >2) recent converts to metric system with limited use of cm. > > > >Joseph B.Reid >17 Glebe Road West >Toronto M5P 1C8 Tel. 416 486-6071 > > Is your boss reading your email? ....Probably Keep your messages private by using Lycos Mail. Sign up today at http://mail.lycos.com
