Re: SI units!

["Bjorn Cedervall" <bcradsafers@hotmail.com>]

>Bjorn, IMO - researchers make up less than one percent of
>the users of radiation units in the US.  They truly are not
>representative of the "Radiation Protection" professionals
>that have to use and report dose and contamination
>measurements everyday.  The "Radiation Protection" society
>in the US is made up mostly of those applying the science -
>not researchers.

In a way I expected this argument - there are however many
radiation protection people in the world outside the U.S.
that use SI units. In the field of radiation protection
we moved away from Ci, rems etc. in Sweden more than
20 years ago and it has been no problem worth mentioning.

But there is another aspect: The information from radiation
sciences has implications for those concerned with radiation
protection and vice versa.  I meet people from both fields
(protection and basic research) and notice that there is not much
of cross-talk. Radiation protection is usually not a big thing
among those working with DNA damage for instance - and molecular biology is 
not a big issue at radiation protection. This is
in a way understandable from the daily relevance for most folks
but there are those who need to quickly grasp information from
the other arena - and could contribute in a valuable way. There
is a general need for more cross-talk besides the SI unit
discussion (the controllable dose concept - I am sure that there
are molecular biologists who could come up with valuable aspects
to the topic but most of them don't even know that it is an issue).

Just looked into a refrigerator that is next to me - most of the
food stuffs have both kJ and kcal on them. I never heard anyone
complaining about that. We used to have only calories on the
foods (until about twenty years ago I think). Now the cost for
having this on labels must be minimal.

Finally - I don't understand the arguments about fighting a
war (Europe - the U.S.) over this (low level of discussion).
Doubt that few people are interested in a fight - the problem
that sometimes must be with units like cubic yards (first time I
heard of them) is to quickly relate them to ounces or whatever.

Bjorn Cedervall,  bcradsafers@hotmail.com
What is IMO BTW?

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