Spelling "Misteaks" 10

[KenAlmon]

Oftentimes I am confronted with words that just don't look right. References to various dictionaries often don't help. Just wondering whether there is a consensus for:

1. plural of bus - busses or buses (I tend to use busbars!)
2. time current curves that don't work resulting in "maloperations" or is it "misoperations"
3. Amps - I was once told by a teacher long ago that anyone who has a unit of measurement named after them, should have the honour of the name being both Capitalized and NOT shortened. Thus the proper terms: Watt-second vs watt-second, Ampere vs Amp or amp, Hertz vs hertz (Hz OK).

If you have any others, I'd like to hear about them. Also, as geography/culture oftentimes bears some role in our spelling, please provide your "connection". I, by the way, am from Canada.

 

[don01]

sorry Lewish
me mum said I was better edyamicated than that. I normally read these posts a couple of times and fix up the worst of my errors that one slipped by me (again) believe me you don't want to see my first type throughs yech!!

IRstuff thanks for that. yet another star and heart felt too. The degree thing has given me a bad time for many many years and often raised my blood temp by many °C Ihave now stuck that on the side of my monitor with the other clues I keep handy. An interesting thing happened when I tried it -- if I use the keys on top of the letters (qwerty....) it doesn't work but on the number pad it does ???? is this normal.

another terminology anomaly, we don't use Y delta starters we have star delta starters. how do these differences develop.? not saying right or wrong but the changes for locations are fascinating.

All the best
Don

 

[don01]

hi all back again
IRstuff
I was just doing a bit of a poke around the SI site in france BIPM.org and did a search on style -- guess what took me to NIST and I pulled down the html style page. The pdf version failed to down load properly but that could be me.

Try

http://www.BIPM.org

and search "style" or

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/units/rules.html

this might be a back door way of getting the info
Regards
Don

 

[IRstuff]

Don,

Thanks for the info.

The link

http://physics.nist.gov/Document/sp811.pdf

appears to be working, at least on my end. I actually found my copy of SP811 when I tried to download the PDF file this morning, doh! ;-)

TTFN TTFN

 

[ve7brz]

I'm finding this thread very interesting and entertaining as a pedant who insists on the proper English spelling of words such as 'colour'.

Celsius is the 'new' SI replacement for Centigrade.

The way I get things like 'º', 'µ', '½' and others into my posts is to use the Windows character map (Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Character map). I've created a shorcut to it on my Desktop. When I want a special character for a post it's a simple matter of minimizing¹ the window, clicking on the character map, selecting the character, copying it to the clipboard, then returning to the post and pasting it in. This is actually simpler than it sounds.

¹ The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1993 edition.

 

[busbar]

ve7 -- There is also stuff like:

"Extended Characters" at

http://www.asciitable.com

and,

http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/eprebel/Communication/CharacterSets/CodePage437.html

Getting " ã " (root symbol) to display correctly here has made my hair fall out in clumps. Good luck.

 

[KenAlmon]

This thread is taking on a life of it's own. Based on the popularity, I am now going to "triple-check" my spelling and grammar before I post!

All good comments - thanks for the enthusiastic response.

IRStuff - star to you for the PDF reference, speaking of which, to contrast with earlier posts by jghrist and IRStuff, please note the following from the NIST SI Manual:

Page 12 talks about capitalization as follows:

"6.1.2 Capitalization
Unit symbols are printed in lower-case letters except that:
(a) the symbol or the first letter of the symbol is an upper-case letter when the name of the unit is
derived from the name of a person; and..."

Page 31 appears to disagree:

"9.5 Spelling unit names obtained by division
When the name of a derived unit formed from other units by division is spelled out, the word ‘‘per’’ is used and not a solidus. (See also Secs. 6.1.7 and 9.8.)
Example : ampere per meter (A/m) but not : ampere/meter"

while the definition section:

"A.5 Ampere (9th CGPM, 1948)
The ampere is that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10 -7 newton per meter of length."

Confusing isn't it!!

 

[ve7brz]

Hi Busbar,

Try ã from either the Unicode or DOS: US character sets in the character map. To save scanning through all the symbols you can simply ask for a search, in this case "square root".

 

[IRstuff]

It's confusing because they're actually talking about different things.

The NIST manual talks about unit names and unit symbols. The name for the unit of current is the lower-case ampere, while the symbol for the unit of current is the upper-case A. So unit names are almost all lower case, while unit symbols are a mix of upper and lower case, depending on whether it's derived from a proper name.

The exception as noted in the appendix is the unit name for temperature being "degrees Celcius" with the unit symbol as °C. So in this case, both the name and symbol are capitalized.

Reponding to an earlier post, the <ALT> keycodes appear to wired for the keypad only, and that's because the keypad actually sends a different keycode than the typewrite key equivalent. If I remember correctly, the keypad sends an <ALT> as part of the keycode directly.
TTFN

 

[ve7brz]

Oops (pardon my poor english). Although the 'root' symbol came up properly on my computer, it obviously didn't make it through the system. My apologies busbar. Next time I'll preview the post before submitting it. We may be stuck with x^½.

 

[busbar]

ve7 — Fortunately, it does show up in preview.

 

[ve7brz]

Here's another stinker: ohm. Try it in ASCII (234) and you get Û. Try it in Unicode (ohm) gets: &#8486;, DOS: Greek (Omega) gets &#937; and Windows: Greek (Omega) gets &#937;. The last three all show properly in the preview.

 

[ve7brz]

Hey! It works!

 

[ve7brz]

I had just turned off a window capture program which was running in the background. I wonder if it was causing problems. I'll try square root again to see what happens now. ã - still doesn't work, although the capture program was was causing problems with ohm.

 

[electricpete]

To get the characters you don't need those numeric codes.

You can use sympol codes deg, alpha, beta, gamma, omega, etc
You just have to put an & in front, enclose it in ignore tags, and put semicolon after the whole thing.

Somthing like this:
[snignore]&quot;&&quot;deg[/snignore];
except it's ignore, not snignore... and no quotes... I had to change it a little to convey the code rather than the symbol. Here is the results:

[ignore]°[/ignore];
[ignore]&alpha[/ignore];
[ignore]&beta[/ignore];
[ignore]&gamma[/ignore];
[ignore]&omega[/ignore];

 

[don01]

hi all
here I sit on a sunday morning reading engineering posts. What has happened to my life?
IRstuff - I'll have another go at getting the style pdf now I'm happy it can come down.

I've thrown some more stars around here 'cause I now have about 4 ways to get symbols lost to me since cpm was a baby.
and I feel really good that I'm not the only person who suffers for symbols and spelling.
KenAlmon, watch out, the grammar police are coming; &quot;triple check&quot; has to be worth a fine of at least 3 stars ? (typed with a laugh)

Regards
Don

 

[jbartos]

Suggestions (related to ANSI/IEEE 945-1984):
1. K-Kelvin SI Symbol (Unit) is aligned with the thermodynamic temperature.
Typical and Recommended Applications and Explanatory Notes: Thermodynamic calculations, radiative heat transfer measurements, noise temperature in radio receivers. Note: The name degree kelvin and symbol °K are no longer used.
2. Celsius temperature. SI Symbol (Unit) °C (degree Celsius)
3. Temperature interval: K (kelvin) or °C (degree Celsius)
4. Milli [m] = 0.001
(It is spelled with two ll not one. This is my correction. I beg your pardon.)

 

[stevenal]

Note that according to the NIST manual, section 9.2, &quot;300 amperes&quot; is correct.

 

[ve7brz]

Hi Don01. There are times when I too wish for the good old days of CPM and the flexibility we enjoyed with our computers.

 

[don01]

ve7brz
So do I then I start remembering using pip, programs that wouldn't transfer from one mc to the other, sitting up till 2 am trying to make a dynamic &quot;propellor&quot; turn on the screen with esc codes and 8x8 work sheets to decode (code??) shapes and characters, but it was more fun and basic (pardon the pun) maybe the hands on thing??.

On the subject of words and bus /ses /es/ just bus / We talk of bus bars as the metal things with electricity in them. Bus ways as the housing or space containing them and bus clamps as the things to hold them in place connecting to bus ties. I am suspecting ( and that doesn't sound right)that may be the correct way is singular bus with plural desciption, How does this sit with the vernacular in the northern climes.

Regards
Don

 

[jbartos]

Suggestion to IRstuff (Aerospace) Jan 9, 2003 marked ///\\Thanks, the keycode for °C is to hold the <ALT> key down and type 0176 on the keypad.
///This does not work with MSWinXP Pro. It works with MSWin98 and lower.\\ Many of the other similar formatted characters can be found the Character Map application in Windoze.
///This is what I use with MSWinXP Pro.\\ The Character Map shows you the hexcode, which you have to convert to decimal and prepend with a 0. It's a GOOD thing...
///Not with MSWinXP Pro.\\\