Re: SI units -- observable and derived

[Judd Sills <sillsj@GAT.COM>]

At 09:04 AM 1/28/97 -0600, you wrote:
>
>     I received a report from another listserver containing an unfamiliar
>     abbreviation.  When I inquired about it, the response didn't shed much
>     light on the meaning.  Below is a copy of the pertinent part of the
>     exchange:
>
>
>     +>+      IN DIA BY 0.1875" LONG AS 30 - 50aeCi OF CS-137.
>     +>                                        ^^^^
>     +>      Is the system misrendering a micro symbol, or is this a
>     +>      special abbreviation of which I was not aware?
>     +
>     +The "ae" is my replacement of a single high-bit character that looks
>     +like "ae"
>
>     I went to my handy references and didn't find this character used for
>     any of the SI prefixes listed.
>
>     Can someone fill me in?
>
>     Just to make it absolutely certain, it appears that the character
>     mentioned is ASCII 145 or 146. In BASIC the command "PRINT CHR$(145),
>     CHR$(146)" will display them on screen.
>
>     Thank you,
>     Dave Neil
>     neildm@inel.gov
>
What you are seeing is an artifact of people still working in Wordperfect
5.1 for
DOS or windows.  The special character, a greek lower case mu, or "micro", as we
know it, when converted by Wordperfect into a ASCII text format for
distribution on
the internet or elsewhere, is converted by Wordperfect to this unique looking 
character "æ" that you find on such documents.  This is very common in
documents 
stored on the NRC servers, and simply will require a mental translation when
you 
encounter it.

Hope that this helps.

Best regards
Judd M. Sills, CHP           |   Office: (619)455-2049
General Atomics, Room 01-166C|      Fax: (619)455-3181
3550 General Atomics Court   |   E-Mail:  sillsj@gat.com
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