Wrong Abbreviations
I’m not much of a list reader, especially abbreviations. Two-letter state abbreviations or a listing of area codes and geographic locations are not what I consider any kind of literature.
Recently I found myself reading ASTM volume 14.02. I was interested in the list of standards that might have impact on me as a microscopist. Information on sieve size and standard practices for reporting particle sizing are both interesting and useful on a daily basis.
More along the lines of fantasy baseball were the procedures on microchemical testing for illegal drugs or the determination of refractive index of glass. These are techniques I have an introduction to, and some skill with, but no current application.
At the end of each ASTM volume is a listing of symbols, references and conversion factors. This section serves as a mini-style guide for authors and standard users to help make reported results similar in description and style.
I discovered several interesting items:
“Gy” is not Goodyear but a “gray” which is an absorbed dose. A dose of what isn’t clear, but if you worked for a tire company you might have a pretty good idea. It’s clearly rubber fumes.
A “ha” is not a unit of laughter, but area of one hectare. I believe it is a farming term. I quess there’s not much laughter in farming today.
“Wb” is of course a weber. Who would have guessed it is a unit of magnetic flux and not an unit of outdoor grilling surface?
A teaspoon has the approximate conversion factor of 5 ml. Somehow “a teaspoon of sugar helps makes the medicine go down” sounds much nicer than 5 milliliters of sugar. In case you’re wondering a tablespoon is about 15 ml.
The strongest value of the metric system, excluding its almost universal acceptance, is the ability to slide up and down the magnitude scale. One centimeter is 10 millimeters or 10 thousand microns (yes, the units are wrong. I’m old and I like microns rather than micrometers. So sue me!)
On the high end of the continuum I noticed mega (ten to the 6th). I didn’t think this was a real scientific prefix but I was wrong. It’s not just a unit of advertising as in Mega-mart. Giga and tera, old hat for some of us, but peta has nothing to do with ethical treatment of animals but stands for ten to the 15th. At the end of the continuum yotta weighs in at ten to the 24th. Clearly that’s a lotta anything.
Sliding down the scale to the small end is femto (ten to the -15) and atto (ten to the -18). That’s small, really small, but not small enough! Still smaller at ten to the -21 is zepto. I assume it was named after Zeppo Marks, a man who could do a lot with very little. Not wanting to be limited by such a small number, we find yotco, which is the number of laughs this column generates or ten to the -24th.
Recently I found myself reading ASTM volume 14.02. I was interested in the list of standards that might have impact on me as a microscopist. Information on sieve size and standard practices for reporting particle sizing are both interesting and useful on a daily basis.
More along the lines of fantasy baseball were the procedures on microchemical testing for illegal drugs or the determination of refractive index of glass. These are techniques I have an introduction to, and some skill with, but no current application.
At the end of each ASTM volume is a listing of symbols, references and conversion factors. This section serves as a mini-style guide for authors and standard users to help make reported results similar in description and style.
I discovered several interesting items:
“Gy” is not Goodyear but a “gray” which is an absorbed dose. A dose of what isn’t clear, but if you worked for a tire company you might have a pretty good idea. It’s clearly rubber fumes.
A “ha” is not a unit of laughter, but area of one hectare. I believe it is a farming term. I quess there’s not much laughter in farming today.
“Wb” is of course a weber. Who would have guessed it is a unit of magnetic flux and not an unit of outdoor grilling surface?
A teaspoon has the approximate conversion factor of 5 ml. Somehow “a teaspoon of sugar helps makes the medicine go down” sounds much nicer than 5 milliliters of sugar. In case you’re wondering a tablespoon is about 15 ml.
The strongest value of the metric system, excluding its almost universal acceptance, is the ability to slide up and down the magnitude scale. One centimeter is 10 millimeters or 10 thousand microns (yes, the units are wrong. I’m old and I like microns rather than micrometers. So sue me!)
On the high end of the continuum I noticed mega (ten to the 6th). I didn’t think this was a real scientific prefix but I was wrong. It’s not just a unit of advertising as in Mega-mart. Giga and tera, old hat for some of us, but peta has nothing to do with ethical treatment of animals but stands for ten to the 15th. At the end of the continuum yotta weighs in at ten to the 24th. Clearly that’s a lotta anything.
Sliding down the scale to the small end is femto (ten to the -15) and atto (ten to the -18). That’s small, really small, but not small enough! Still smaller at ten to the -21 is zepto. I assume it was named after Zeppo Marks, a man who could do a lot with very little. Not wanting to be limited by such a small number, we find yotco, which is the number of laughs this column generates or ten to the -24th.
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