I suspect Nat Hager knew that, but trusted
the rest of us to recognize, as you did (and as I did), that they were
exponents.
I pointed out, in USMA: 28341, that he could
have preserved them in an HTML-formatted email.
Unfortunately, email software does not
typically allow one to format characters as superscripts (Outlook 2000 certainly
doesn't), so he would have to have copied the existing HTML code (from the web
site where he found it) to a message set up for HTML formatting, rather than the
plain text message he used.
It shouldn't really be a big deal to us
cognoscenti, though. <g>.
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
-----Original Message-----Andy Johnson emphasized that we should be sure look at the "metric conversions" at the end of the Edmonton journal article. Some of them are quite clever and funny. The first two however, were garbled somewhere; I don't know if the Edmonton paper printed them that way or whether the got garbled on the internet or on the email messages that copied the article.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Bill and/or Barbara Hooper
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 19:16
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:28346] those conversions in Edmonton article
As I saw it in the original article submitted by Nat Hager and later repeated and emphasized by Andy Johnson, the first two conversions read:
1,012 microphones = 1 megaphone
106 bicycles = two megacycles
Clearly these have been erroneously copied. Someone, through whose hands this passed, knew little or nothing about scientific notation (powers of ten), or perhaps knew that but didn't know how to type exponents.
The above two "conversions" should have been:
(10 to the 12th power) microphones = 1 megaphone
(10 to the 6th power) bicycles = two megacycles
I have written out the powers of ten to avoid having the same problems that my unknown predecessor had. the only way I know to reliably type them in email (without using HTML or something) is to use the caret mark (^) to indicate an exponent, so I would have had to write:
10^12 microphones = 1 megaphone
10^6 bicycles = 2 megacycles
It is interesting that, after the power of ten had been incorrectly written in the first example, the error was compounded by adding a comma to separate the thousands from the hundreds. That is:
10^12 erroneously became 1012 which then became 1,012
This clearly shows that, at some point, someone did not just mistype something, but he or she really thought it was supposed to be one thousand twelve instead of ten to the twelfth power.
At least there was only one error when 10^6 erroneously became 106.
By the way, there are many more of those humerous "conversions". There is even a list in the college physics book I taught from over many years.
Regards,
Bill Hooper
Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA
