I liked the symbol for angstrom. The speed of light has been consecrated with the recent change to define the meter in terms of the speed of light in vacuum. This makes questioning and testing special relativity seem foolish. With changes like this it makes me wonder if science professionals are as removed from the spirit of science as the so called science deniers.
Harry On Fri., Nov. 15, 2024, 5:22 p.m. MSF, <[email protected]> wrote: > Although these changes in the naming of things technical are of no great > import, they are particularly galling to someone my age. When you've been > calling something a name for six or seven decades only to find that some > committee has changed it for reasons that amount to the exercise of > self-importance, well, I'm feeling a little left out. > > Let's see: One that has annoyed me fairly recently is that centipoise is > now referred to as milliPascal-seconds (mPas.s) . They are the same thing. > Why, oh why? I've been measuring viscosity for more than seventy years and > felt no need to change the terminology. > > Can't say ferrous and ferric anymore. Gotta be iron one and iron two. Poor > chem students can't make the ferrous wheel structural formula joke anymore. > > I grew up with Angstroms for light wavelength measurements and was sort of > put off when everyone started using nanometers. Seems sort of less precise > even though it isn't. That literally happened in the space of a month as > far as I can determine. > > There have been an entire panoply of name changes for types of optical > glass too numerous to go into here. Who else would care? > > It's been acetic acid and its compounds acetates for a couple of hundred > years, but no, we must have propionic acid and propionates. The names lack > character. Make sure you don't put that vinegar on your salad any more; you > might become propionated. Oh, the horror! > > Photographers who use actual film have been using potassium ferricyanide > as a bleach or reducer for more than a hundred years, but now they might > not be able to find it, because its name has been changed to potassium > hexacyanoferrate. What miserable committee came up with that one? If you're > an old chem guy, it was more or less the assumption that anything ending in > "ate" contained oxygen. You know, sulfate, carbonate, etc. There's no > oxygen in potassium ferricyanide. Aw, well, plus ca change. > > These are the ones that occur to me immediately, but there are a lot more. > > End of ridiculous rant..... > > > MSF >
