Jinx,

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 00:44:49 +1300, Jinx wrote:

> (what comes after Tera?)
> 
> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Administrivia/notation.html
> 
> Bottom of page

Thanks for that, and sorry for being too busy (lazy?) to look them up myself.  Interesting that I could 
remember femto and atto (1964) but not Peta and Exa (1975).  I think I probably learned them in about 1972!

But it does show two anomalies that annoy me:  the single exception to the typewriter-characters that I 
mentioned (mu), and the fact that "k" really ought to be "K" to indicate that its greater than one.  I ignore 
the non-3 powers (c, d, D, h) because I think they're unnecessary, so other than k the lower case letters are 
less than one and the capitals are greater.  I can easily go from millimetres to metres with no need for 
centimetres!  In fact I've just realised that I do - I just checked a tape-measure and it's marked in cm with 
mm divisions, but I always "read" it in mm.  

Incidentally, do you use feet and inches down under?  We still use both somewhat (clothes sizes are in inches, 
timber is in mm but using close approximations to the actual inch sizes so floorboards are 19x144, not 20x150) 
and rulers and tape-measures have both.  I was a tad suprised that in the US tape measures only have inches - 
I thought they'd have both since they are "in the process of metrication", at least officially.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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