At 00:55 03/13/99 -0500, Bob Drzyzgula wrote:
>In this case, I will disagree. If 10kOhms can't be written
>"10K", 

of course it can, and mA can be written Mamps... as long as you stay within
a =small= context, everybody'll understand.

>then certainly 10 degrees Kelvin has no greater right
>to go around naked like that -- at least it needs to have
>the ”, out of fairness if nothing else. But seriously, "K"
>by itself is not, AFAIK, assigned to *any* unit if measure;
>degrees Kelvin is ”K, beginning and end of story; 

nope. i don't know where the beginning of the story is, and i certainly
don't know where the end will be, but "K" is the unit "Kelvin" for the
absolute temperature in the SI ("Systme Internacional") -- no "”", no
"degree". Celsius, Fahrenheit and Reaumur use ”, though.

>Horowitz
>and Hill argue vehemently that "10K" is unambiguously
>10kOhms; the argument for this is that resistance is the only
>unit so fundamental to the study of electronics that it
>can be unambiguously stated without the use of the Omega
>or word Ohm. It is a judgement call whether or not to go
>along with this, but the potential for confusion with Kelvin
>isn't a valid argument against it, IMHO. The common usage
>of "5R1" for 5.1 Ohms and "5K1" for 5.1 kOhms is similarly
>contestable, but seems fairly well ingrained even in the
>labling of, say, 1% resistors.

i still don't understand why you insist in using the upper case "k". it
sounds everything fine, except for the upper case. =my= keyboard, at least,
makes it even more comfortable to write 5k1 than 5K1. and i agree
completely with you that for resistors, capacitors and inductors the form
to write 5k1 or 4u7 is in most cases pretty unambiguous, especially when
used in a schematic. and it's a whole lot safer against misreading than
5.1kOhm -- the dot sometimes gets pretty tiny.

>square centameters, not centasquaremeters.) 

right, but it's "centimeters" (also in english, i think, but i'm no native
speaker :)

ge