In reply to  MSF's message of Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:22:35 +0000:
Hi Michael,
[snip]

I think propionic acid has 3 carbon atoms, and acetic acid only 2. (Think 
propane.)

>Although these changes in the naming of things technical are of no great 
>import, they are particularly galling to someone my age. When you've been 
>calling something a name for six or seven decades only to find that some 
>committee has changed it for reasons that amount to the exercise of 
>self-importance, well, I'm feeling a little left out.
>
>Let's see: One that has annoyed me fairly recently is that centipoise is now 
>referred to as milliPascal-seconds (mPas.s) . They are the same thing. Why, oh 
>why? I've been measuring viscosity for more than seventy years and felt no 
>need to change the terminology.
>
>Can't say ferrous and ferric anymore. Gotta be iron one and iron two. Poor 
>chem students can't make the ferrous wheel structural formula joke anymore.
>
>I grew up with Angstroms for light wavelength measurements and was sort of put 
>off when everyone started using nanometers. Seems sort of less precise even 
>though it isn't. That literally happened in the space of a month as far as I 
>can determine.
>
>There have been an entire panoply of name changes for types of optical glass 
>too numerous to go into here. Who else would care?
>
>It's been acetic acid and its compounds acetates for a couple of hundred 
>years, but no, we must have propionic acid and propionates. The names lack 
>character. Make sure you don't put that vinegar on your salad any more; you 
>might become propionated. Oh, the horror!
>
>Photographers who use actual film have been using potassium ferricyanide as a 
>bleach or reducer for more than a hundred years, but now they might not be 
>able to find it, because its name has been changed to potassium 
>hexacyanoferrate. What miserable committee came up with that one? If you're an 
>old chem guy, it was more or less the assumption that anything ending in "ate" 
>contained oxygen. You know, sulfate, carbonate, etc. There's no oxygen in 
>potassium ferricyanide. Aw, well, plus ca change.
>
>These are the ones that occur to me immediately, but there are a lot more.
>
>End of ridiculous rant.....
>
>MSF
Regards,

Robin van Spaandonk

The future of computer memory clearly lies with multi-layered SOT-MRAM.
Fast as SRAM, dense as NAND, very low energy due to non-volatility, 
and near infinite rewrites.

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