Bill,

On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:17:26 -0800, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

>... 
> Do a web search for "mf capacitor."  Restrict the search to your
> favorite metric country if you want.  Check out how often it means
> micro, and how often it means milli...
>...
>... http://www.maplin.co.uk/searchpages/2200_MF_CAPACITOR.htm

This one's a bit unfair - it's a search-result screen, where someone searched the Maplin site for 2200 MF 
CAPACITOR, and didn't find any exact matches, so it's showing a near-miss that doesn't contain "MF" - that 
hardly counts as a hit!  I'm not even sure they would have used capitals - the search engine may have 
capitalised it.

And I've just tried a UK-Google search for "mf capacitor" and found that it gives hits where the mu character 
is used, as if someone at Google has decided that "m" a synonym for mu, so I'm not sure how valid is your 
assertion above.

Personally I've never seen mF used for microfarads in Britain - if the mu character isn't available the 
convention is to use u.  I wonder why this hasn't been made a more formal standard, since it's the only 
non-typewriter character that's used as a scaling factor - you can go all the way from a to T (what comes 
after Tera?) with only mu being the odd one out.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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