I mentioned this book once before: "Sustainable Energy - without hot air." Its brilliant author, an Englishman, decided to continue the narrow-minded habit of his ancestors by making himself a unit for his book. A man of that caliber would, one should hope, recognize the advantage of coherence among units and stick with it. Not so. Metric yes, SI no.
Reading this enormously useful book, it annoyed me having to go thru endless conversions to his preferred "kWh per day" from the much shorter and commonly used W. How much easier it would be to read the book if one were not bothered a dozen times on a page after page with repetitious conversions in brackets such as ........ 45 GW (18 kWh per day) ....... or .......18 kWh per day (45 GW) ......... I wrote to the publisher and you might find the letter interesting. It is attached. To keep it to the (metric) point, the first two paragraphs are omitted - they were compliments to the author and the publisher. If you agree with the suggestion at the end of the attachment, write also. You can paste/forward my letter. Stan Jakuba
Le-MacKay.doc
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