> * While popular usage is almost entirely against me, I'm unsure that eg
> millifarad should be correct.
> The fundamental unit is, of course, the Farad and should be capitalised when
> written as it was named after Faraday. Similarly Amp, Ohm, Erlang, Volt,
> Kelvin etc. But not, of course,  eg second, minute, metre, foot, pound,
> kilogram.
> So, while millisecond is permissible I suspect we should have milliFarad or
> milli-Farad (or even milli Farad).

The NIST suggests to use the unit abbreviations (with they proper
capitalization, of course) in technical and scientific texts, for clarity. 

But in an example, they also write "60 watts" with a lower case first
letter... even though that should be, according to you, "60 Watt" (or "60
Watts"?). But then, the NIST is in the USA :)  I guess they're right about
that it's better to use the correct unit abbreviations.

One interesting thing is their suggestion to drop ppm etc, especially ppb.
Instead of these they suggest something like (uA/A), which adds some
information that ppm doesn't have. And the specific problem with ppb is
that "billion" is quite an ambiguous expression.

Gerhard
_______________________________________________
http://www.piclist.com
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist