A late friend of mine, who once worked for Bell Telephone back in the pre-breakup days when it was THE Bell System, used to use the bel all the time when describing problems with the equipment. Admittedly, he did do it to throw the "holier than thou" foremen off balance by confusing them (for example, by referring to "three-tenths of a bel" instead of 3 dB).
He also disliked the hertz and insisted on using kilocycles and megacycles instead of kilohertz and megahertz. He maintained that the term "cycle" was more self-descriptive. He had no problem with the older MKS metric system but disliked SI (a complaint I have heard from other engineers as well). -- Jason ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2003 10:27 AM Subject: [USMA:27976] B for bel > Re: 27961 and 27965 Note that according to NIST 811 page 9, > bel has the symbol B. bel is a logarithm of a ratio so, of > itself, it has no dimension and is not subject to SI. (Do I > say this right?) The use of bel itself is rare. We usually > see dB, in acoustics and radio. It is not an SI unit but > 811 says that "in the view of this Guide" it may be used > with SI. > Robert Bushnell >
