Be Aware of Case in Units of Measurement
Most of you are aware of the difference between lower case m and uppercase M in units of measurements. By convention and international standards lower case m means milli, one thousand, and upper case M means million. So we have ms meaning millisecond and MHz meaning million periods per second. I do not know if the mistakes are made by engineers or editors and copywriters. I have seen ads for large companies boast that their latest computers have a clock speed of 200 mHz, two-tenths of a period per second! Not much to boost about.
The reason behind the importance of distinguishing between lower and upper case is that there are not enough letters in the Latin alphabet to represent all measurements. Not even the combination of lower and upper case Latin characters are enough, we had to go to Greek letters. For instance, the Greek letter µ stands for one millionth.
Another confusion is the lower case k standing for one thousand. Thus 2k stands for 2,000. People working on the year 2000 computer problem, said "great we will abbreviate it Y2K." The problem is that in many cases they used the upper case K as shown. Now, upper case K is not an international standard (except to mean degrees Kelvin). There is a trend in the computer industry to let upper case K stand for two to the power of ten, or 1,024. So now Y2K stands for the year 2048! Not exactly a computer problem year as far as anyone knows.
Dear authors: Be careful with your characters.
Bertil Lindberg
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Last revised July 16, 2003.
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