I appreciate the praise received for the suggested "metrication strategy" that said: Sell units, forget about selling metric. How to sell units? Use them. When? Now. Where? Everywhere.
In addition, I should like to advise the following: When doing so, use symbols. Do not write out, nor spell out, metric units and prefixes. For example, kPa is pronounced k p a just like psi is pronounced p s i. Do not say or write thirty kilopascals; say thirty k p a , write 30 kPa. (No need to remind me of the press editorial guidelines - everything can be changed, and they do not apply to discussion groups.) The rationale for the brevity? Endlessly I hear complains from most inch-pound people that metric units are too long. Perhaps they are, in comparison to "rod" or "are," but certainly not to "horsepower" or "british thermal unit." But that's besides the point. Anti-metrics seem forgetting that in I-P one adds the names of the powers of ten (10³) to the units. Few realize that, for example, saying " k p a " is shorter than saying "thousand p s i." Or that " k m " is pronounced quicker than "thousand miles." SI symbols are brief and we Americans love abbreviations and acronyms. That realization should ease the road to metric. Pat, please write EJ, not exajoule. We will pronounce it e j and soon others will learn that energy in e j means a lot of it, like in oil reserves. As another example, inspired by my earlier e-mail, the same with GW. Let's use only the symbol, not the word gigawatt, and pronounce it g w . While on the brevity, let me also re-introduce clarity to the terminology in the energy-related discussions I just wrote about elsewhere. I suggested to call the quantity "energy per time" the "wattage." Energy/time is wattage - the "new" term for what used to be called power. As said, I had seen it used sporadically in the past. Stan Jakuba
