On Saturday 10 December 2005 20:59, Bill Hooper wrote: > I cannot comprehend how a properly written (or printed) Greek letter > mu (ยต) can be mistaken for a properly written (or printed) Latin letter > em (m).
I think it's more lack of metric education than confusing the letters. I was at a friend's house a few hours ago. He came from England before it metricated and still thinks in inches and Fahrenheit, which annoys me because I've been in the States all the time and I think in millimeters since I was a kid. He told me he had some 60000-microcandela LEDs and he took them out in the sun and one of them lit the whole box up and it was obvious even in bright sunlight. Then he tried to compute with the figure and said it was 0.6 candela. Neither of those sounded right. I tried to guess how many lumens it was (they list lumens on light bulb packages) and asked him how much power it takes to figure out how many lumens per watt (of which the maximum possible is 683 by definition). He showed me the bag, which said "60000mcd". He had misread the package and it's actually 60 candelas, which sounds more like enough to light up a box in bright sunlight. I did not hit him on the head for this, which would have made him see 36 candelas, as the French say ;) Capacitors are quoted in microfarads and picofarads, but rarely nanofarads. Is it because the 'n' could be confused with 'm'? phma
