cycles to hertz - when?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Scott used his keyboard to write :

Yes, it used to be, but it slowed down over time lol

[The Natural Philosopher]

No.

[alan_m]

Do you mean that pi is not 22/7. A lot of exam questions had the 22 and

7, to be cancelled out by pi.

[Brian Gaff]

I blame that Dutch firm, Hertz Van Rentals myself...:-) Brian

[Jethro_uk]

Not quite as specialist, but cropped up in chat a few days ago, is when did Centigrade become Celcius in the UK ? Because we sure as hell used centigrade at school.

(also when did Peking change it's name ? And Bombay ? And when did "Islamic" become "Islamist" ? )

[The Natural Philosopher]

Never. Its Celsius and its IIRC not quite the same thing as Centigrade.

60s sometime.

When political correctness canme in. 80s/90s.

[Fredxx]

Wikipedia says, "Centigrade, a historical forerunner to the Celsius temperature scale, synonymous in modern usage"

Peking has always be Beijing, only through ignorance has it been called Peking. Same with Paris.

Bombay? 1995 when the Indian government changed the name.

There was a time when gay meant happy, change is a form of marching progress. Best live with it or get left behind.

[Roger Hayter]

Light frequencies, and especially infrared, are often still described as a wavelength in nanometres.

[Another Dave]

There has been talk of redefining the metre so the speed of light in vacuo is precisely that. Since the metre isn't 1/10,000,000th the distance from the equator to the pole as intended, it shouldn't offend anybody. I suppose too much inertia has now made the change impossible.

Another Dave

[S Viemeister]

Sometimes it was Beiping or Peiping.

[bert]

From Wiki It was adopted by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) (Conférence générale des poids et mesures) in 1960, replacing the previous name for the unit, cycles per second (cps), along with its related multiples, primarily kilocycles per second (kc/s) and megacycles per second (Mc/s), and occasionally kilomegacycles per second (kMc/s). The term cycles per second was largely replaced by hertz by the 1970s. One hobby magazine, Electronics Illustrated, declared their intention to stick with the traditional kc., Mc., etc. units.[8]

[Bill Wright]

Mkt presumably

Bill

[Graham.]

Aren't the pips deliberately retarded so they are accurately received

100 miles away? Perfect for Lon^H^H^HSalford.

[Bill Wright]

That needs further explanation.

I'm sure that ought to be on Quote Unquote or somewhere!

Bill

[Dave Plowman (News)]

They did. IIRC, the name changed in the '60s.

[NY]

I'm sure we were still referring to temperature in degrees centigrade, including in physics and chemistry at A level (ie not just colloquial usage) in the late 70s and early 80s. In contrast, I can't remember ever being taught about frequencies in cps rather than Hz, so that change happened (and was assimilated into teaching courses) earlier than that. Is there any difference in size or zero-point for deg centigrade and deg Celsius? I realise that the unit size of K is the same as deg C, but with a 0 origin at -273.15 deg C.

I did Nuffield physics and chemistry courses at O and A level. I remember their insistence on expressing units with negative powers - so speeds in m.s^-1 rather than m/s, and densities in kg.m^-3 rather than kg/m^3 - which always struck me as pedantic and out of step with common usage. (where "^" denotes that what follows is superscript). I'm not sure how you were supposed to refer to such units in spoken words - did they want us to say "metres seconds to the minus one" or "metres per second" ;-)

[NY]

Slightly different with names European cities. The pronunciation of Paris in English has always be Pariss rather than the proper French "Paree". Likewise for the French name for London, Londres. And our name Munich for what the Germans call München, and our spelling Hanover for the German city that they spell Hannover. It's only like England versus Angleterre, or Deutschland versus Germany versus Allemagne.

[NY]

Whereas at one time they were quoted in Angstroms - when 1 ? is 0.1 nm or

100 pm.

[NY]

They would! I think it was EI that also had a house style of putting dots between initials and always using lower-case except for metric prefixes, so

kc.p.s.rather than kcps or kc/s (or kHz) Mc.p.s. rather than Mcps or Mc/s (or MHz) i.c. rather than IC (integrated circuit) p.c. rather than PC (personal computer) e.p.r.o.m. rather than EPROM

which made it harder to read because the eye is attuned to trying to pronounce "words" of lower-case letters, whereas it is attuned to treating multiple capital letters as individual letters unless they can easily be pronounced.

[NY]

Anyone who has read Anthony Horowitz's novel Magpie Murders will know what his character name Atticus Pund is an anagram of ;-)