*USMA members will, I hope, be pleased reading the answer to an editor who desired that American units be presented alongside the SI values in my manuscript. *
*Dear ....* *I attempted the parenthesis you suggested but found the resulting complexity of the text disruptive and harder to read. And there are other problems associated with doubling each unit. Allow me a few words of explanation.* *The article is about comparing two sets of numbers. For that, there need not be any unit at all. The majority of readers will skip the units anyway, and the few curious engineers and physics teachers will know how to convert to whatever units they like. As to the several common values I doubt that there are readers that wouldn't know that water freezes at 0 deg. Celsius or what a km is. As to the substitution for the one still unfamiliar unit – the joule or MJ – here Americans use several different units for energy such as calorie, Btu, kilowatt hour, lb-ft. As a result. I am at a loss which one to select. Different professions** use them all – that would be four parentheses. Instead, I spelled out the symbol MJ and use it consistently thereafter. Thus no problem with comparing numbers. In any case non-technical readers will not care, and experts who might be checking the math will convert the value to whichever unit they like. I am pleased to say that, up to now, **no publisher asked me to add conversions. Dozens of articles, no complains. May I say that one might underestimate one’s readers?* *As a side issue, you may be interested in why I insist on the units of a system that has only one unit for any measurement, be it energy, power, or length. That’s because, with the multiplicity of the U.S. energy and power units, it is common to present false or misleading numbers and get away with it for it is too difficult and bothersome for readers to look up all the conversion factors to check. I might also point out that since it is the Federal Law and Exec. Order that state that "SI metric is the preferred measurement system in the **U.S.**" my writing in SI only should help citizens learning it. Once they see how **easy comparisons are with SI units, they might actually prefer that system particularly when noticing the cheating in the daily press with American units such as the one illustrated in the other enclosed treatise. * *Yours,* *Stan Jakuba*
