I'm sorry you feel miffed, Jesse.
IEEE standards are formal documents and you indicated that you would use
formal writing in a formal document.
As I indicated, engineers and physicists that I have worked with tend to
be more casual in their speech. I saw this to be true with regard to
units among the physicists I knew. That's merely an observation of mine
and I hope it didn't upset you.
So, I suppose you are miffed that, as I said, some folks would call
casual speech "sloppy".
Jim
Ziser, Jesse wrote:
--- James Frysinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
All my co-workers can be assumed to know the full set of metric prefixes
(they'll look it up
if
they don't), and if they need to discuss a concept that has no name (i.e.
something that
naturally
happens in units of 72 millimeters for some reason) they will actually make up
a temporary
term to
simplify communication ("OK, this word salad is getting hard to follow. Let's
start calling
these
lengths 'lambdas'"). I'm all for simplifying the units used to communicate
formally and to
interact with the ordinary public. But for informal engineering discussions
and the like,
those
terms probably still have value.
Neither "centiamps" nor "milliamps" would be acceptable in an IEEE
standard. Unit names are to be spelled out completely or symbolized, as
in "milliamperes" or "mA". It would be acceptable, though not
preferable, to use "centiamperes" or "cA". Nor does IEEE accept "kilos",
"klicks", or the like. In my experience while working in each field,
yes, engineers are more casual (some might say "sloppy") in casual
speech when using these units names but I found that physicists are even
more so.
*insert miffed emoticon here*
I object to the characterization of efficient and concise speech as "sloppy".
Tell me, what
information is being lost by dropping the final syllable there? I am one of the least
"sloppy"
engineers you'll meet. I don't like doing extra work for no reason. I'd
rather expend that joule
of energy on noticing one more possible inconsistency in an idea than on
uttering one more
syllable of an unnecessarily long and easily abbreviated word.
As I already implied, I would use formal writing in a formal document.
However, IEEE doesn't
regulate conversation, and if it did, nothing would ever get done. There is a
proven limit to the
length and complexity of a sentence that the human mind can understand.
Mistakes happen when
people don't do a good job of being concise. Concise matters.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Looking for last minute shopping deals?
Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping
--
James R. Frysinger
632 Stony Point Mountain Road
Doyle, TN 38559-3030
(H) 931.657.3107
(C) 931.212.0267
