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.