You say 'Most people well versed in SI would recommend the spelling "metre" and "litre" rather >than "meter" and "liter".'While sufficient labour has gone into correction of *spellings and the confused ststus about -re &
-er* use among various parts of world; is it too late to DECIDE what the Systeme Internationale d'Unites has been or *should be* using to make SI(in all languages) to be the world language of measurements?
HAPPY VALENTINES (the Ranjha) DAY
Brij Bhushan Vij <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
20040214/08:61(decimal) AM(IST)
Aa Nau Bhadra Kritvo Yantu Vishwatah -Rg Veda.
*****The New Calendar Rhyme*****
Thirty days in July, September:
April, June, November, December;
All the rest have thirty-one; accepting February alone:
Which hath but twenty-nine, to be (in) fine;
Till leap year gives the whole week READY:
Is it not time to MODIFY or change to make it perennial, Oh Daddy!
And make the calendar work with Leap Week Rule! ***** ***** ***** *****
From: "Bill Potts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [USMA:28666] RE: Metric in Montgomery Co. Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:49:30 -0800
Bill:
Just a couple of points:
1.. You say 'Most people well versed in SI would recommend the spelling
"metre" and "litre" rather than "meter" and "liter".'
That's not necessarily true. The Germans, the Dutch, the residents of the
Scandinavian countries, and others would not agree with you on that. Nor
would most of the U.S.-based SI advocates in this list. The IEEE/ASTM SI 10
document uses "meter" and "liter." Although, in an ideal world, my personal
preference would be for "metre" and "litre," I decided, long ago (even when
I lived in Canada) that my preference was, overall, for American spelling. I
subsequently decided that there was no point in making an exception for
"meter" and "liter," especially as I now live here (and have done so for 27
years).
2.. HTML has no problem with superscripts or subscripts and there is
nothing special about including them, so Mr.. Szesze should have no problem
correcting his web site. As this message is HTML, there is no problem here,
either: e.g., cm3. However, I had to cheat to do that, in that I did in in
FrontPage 2003, then copied it into this message. (Outlook 2000 doesn't
include superscripts in its font formatting options. I could describe how to
do it with Notepad and one's browser, but I'll only do so if someone asks.
MS Word should work, too.)
[Although many encoding schemes allow the use of the prime versions of 1,
2 and 3, usage inconsistencies make it difficult to guarantee (as you
indicated, with the �) that they'll appear correctly at the receiving end.
The �, itself, is a reliable exception, by the way -- as long as the
encoding isn't 7-bit ASCII.]
Bill Potts, CMS
Roseville, CA
http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf
Of Bill Hooper
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2004 11:09
To: U.S. Metric Association
Cc: USMA
Subject: [USMA:28660] Metric in Montgomery Co.
Mr. Szesze:
Mr. G. Stanley Doore directed me to your excellent metric pages of the Montgomery County Public School web site starting at: http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/curriculum/science/instr/metric.htm I applaud your actions to prepare your students for the real world by emphasizing metric measurements in your curriculum.
I hope you will not object to my making a couple comments on the page on
unit symbols. My references are to the English version of the official
document entitled "The International System of Units (SI)" 7th addition 1998
(and its 2000 supplement when necessary) published by the Bureau
International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and
Measures).
Under "Mass" I find: Mg=T = megagram = Tonne (metric) which is not correct. The SI symbol for tonne is a lower case "t" not a capital "T". (ref: page 105, table 6, "Non-SI units accepted for use with the International System")
The names of the units like tonne (and litre) are not proper names and so
should not be capitalized except where you would capitalize other words
(such as at the beginning of a sentence or in titles or when all caps are
used).
Most people well versed in SI would recommend the spelling "metre" and "litre" rather than "meter" and "liter".
In the various places where exponents are needed, those exponents are not
written as superscripts, as they should be. Examples are the symbols for
cubic metre and cubic decimetre. Other examples are in the list of all the
prefixes. I admit that it is possible that your web page DOES produce the
required superscripts and that my web browser just cannot reproduce them.
(I can't produce the superscripts in my email message either, but I would
hope that your web page would be sufficiently sophisticated that it could.
Either that, or add a note explaining that such exponents should be written
as superscripts even though your software is not capable of doing so. I
often use the caret mark (^) to indicate exponentiation, thus: m^3 for cubic
metres and 10^-6 for ten to the minus 6 power.)
Under SI Base Units, the word length is misspelled, a purely typographical
error, apparently.
Under SI Prefixes, I find:
10 -6 micro u
in which the symbol is not correct. The symbol for 10 to the -6 power is
the lower case Greek letter mu, not the lower case Latin letter "u". The
l.c. mu looks like this � (I hope). I have produce it correctly on my copy
of this email message but I cannot guarantee the you will receive it
correctly. That is unfortunately the case for a number of special characters
when they are transmitted from one computer to another by email or internet.
I am curious about your choice of prefixes to show in your list. It is not
complete although it is so long that it appears that you intended it to be
complete. It is missing the prefix and symbol for 10 to the plus 24th power,
which is yotta (symbol: capital Y). Also missing are the prefixes for 10 to
the minus 21st power and 10 to the minus 24th powers. They are zepto
(symbol: lower case z) for 10^-21 and yocto (symbol: lower case y) for
10^-24. (Ref: page 103, Table 5, "SI prefixes")
I hope my comments above are helpful. I'm sure you agree that those of us
who are responsible for teaching the SI system need to be especially
diligent about getting the details correct.
William Hooper Certified Advanced Metric Specialist
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