Speaking of energy .. one thing I wish would come into common usage, because I've found it really handy for comparison purposes, is expressing energy in joules (one of my favorite SI units), because it's both a newton-meter of work (not a newton-meter of torque! :) and a watt-second of energy. Outside the scientific community, energy is referred to as everything from BTU (heating/cooling) to gallons of gasoline (automotive) to tons of TNT (nuclear weapons) to foot-pounds of work (ballistics), it's enough to make an empirical skilled generalist's head spin. (And I know I'm not the only one of those.)
And yes, a liter of water is a kilogram, by definition, since the gram was originally defined (IIRC) as the mass of a cubic centimeter (i.e. milliliter) of water. (The kilogram is one of the few units still referenced to a physical standard object kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, interestingly enough. The meter used to be referenced to a standard meter bar kept at the same bureau, but has now been defined by a quantum standard that doesn't require reference to a physical object.)
On Jan 20, 2007, at 11:02 PM, laura halliday wrote:
It's so much easier in metric, where a kilogram is very much a unit of mass, while force is measured in newtons...and let's not worry about ergs and dynes and things: SI is mks.
ENGLISH: A language that lurks in dark alleys, beats up other languages, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.