On Wed, 3 Nov 1999 06:38:48 -0800 Nick Taylor writes: >Russell, >Do you have a reference for 10^1 and 10^2 units being forbidden? I >have the NIST Special Pub 811 (US) booklet in front of me and cannot >find any such reference. > >Here is the list of terms that are "unacceptable": >erg, dyne, poise, stokes, gauss, oersted, maxwell, stilb, phot, fermi, >metric carat, torr, standard atmosphere, kilogram force, micron, >calorie, >x unit, stere, gamma, gamma (mass), gamma (volume). > Thanks to this list, I did get the NIST publication. Let's see... units above that I have used include erg (energy, as I recall), dyne (I think that's force... as I recall, we measured pressure in dynes per square centimeter), poise (a summer job was calibrating viscometers where the viscosity of fluid was measured in centipoise), gauss, oersted, and maxwell I recently (within the past five years) dealt with in teaching an electronics class that included magnetics. The calorie (not the kcal or Calorie of dieting fame) is what I used in a junior high school science fair project showing the relationship between watt-seconds and calories, and showing the heat capacity of water. So... what IS the standard unit for energy now, if not the calorie? Is it the watt-second? This also reminds me of an article by Bob Pease in a recent EDN where he discusses light and the MANY measures of it. Some are described as units of brightness and others are intensity, both of which are meaningless to me. As I wrote in an email to him, it appears we are either dealing with POWER (watts, or, more archaicly "candle") or POWER DENSITY (watts per square meter, or, a more archaic unit, foot-candle). In the email I argued that we keep the metric prefixes out of the denominator of units. Thus, it seems we should avoid power densities in milliwatts per square centimeter, instead doing [insert prefix here] watts per square meter. Harold Harold Harold Hallikainen harold@hallikainen.com Hallikainen & Friends, Inc. See the FCC Rules at http://hallikainen.com/FccRules and comments filed in LPFM proceeding at http://hallikainen.com/lpfm ___________________________________________________________________ Get the Internet just the way you want it. Free software, free e-mail, and free Internet access for a month! Try Juno Web: http://dl.www.juno.com/dynoget/tagj.