Remember that body? Under the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, the U.S. Metric Board was supposed to be a broad-spectrum panel of experts charged with coordinating the increasing use of the metric system in the United States. Although President Reagan disbanded the USMB in the early 1980s, I believe that the existence of a functioning USMB is going to be essential to the process of U.S. metrication. There has to be a clearinghouse for the intersection of ideas on what is a complex subject, and the MCA has already established it. Right now, I think that this List is serving as the "USMB in exile." Excellent examples of such an exchange of ideas are these posts from Scott Hudnall and Martin Vlietstra. They illustrate beautifully the problems we would face in implementing the electronic use of SI symbols in an SI-shy nation, and would not have been exposed for discussion without the interdisciplinary dialogue that a USMB would provide:
Hudnall: Since I work as a programmer in laboratory informatics, perhaps I could lend some insight as to why you often see these sort of abbreviations sometimes make their way into lab reports. It has nothing to do with an understanding of SI and everything to do with a compromise programmers have to make to get their software as database-independent as possible. This means if you use standard SI and chemistry symbols in your database you run into a primary-key violation on the UNITS table since every unit has to have a unique value. Some database products are case-sensitive, others are not so some databases can distinguish between mm (millimeter) and mM (millimolar), while others can not. The best way to ensure that all databases understand what you mean is to always use all capitol letters but that means you have to use non-SI symbols in order to have unique values for every entry. Also, to be able store symbols such as Greek letters and math symbols in text fields, you would need to define the fields as UNICODE....and that is going to cost you a lot of processor overhead. Quoting Martin Vlietstra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > The UNICODE language has two letters "µ" which are written identically but > which have different meanings - one with the value 0#00B5 is described as > the "MICRO SIGN" and is the Latin-1 page while the one with the value 0#03BC > is described as "GREEK SMALL LETTER MU" and is in the Greek page. > > There was a case for not using the "µ" symbol some years ago when printers > used pure ASCII (ie the character set 0#0000 thru 0#007F) and the British > variant was to replace the "#" symbol with the "£" symbol. Those days are > now past and apart from the United States (who can still use pure ASCII), > all other countries who use the Western European Latin script include "µ" in > their character set along with "£", "þ", "Ã", "ã" (having values in the > range 0#0080 thru 0#00FF) etc. Certain European countries (for example > Germany), have a key marked "µ". > >
