I have been very busy adapting to my new job, which is essentially to be a janitor at a electronic design automation startup company. A programming janitor - I clean up memory leaks and core dumps, and if a program throws up, I am there with a bucket of sawdust and a mop. Maybe six months into the new job, I am finally starting to figure out what it is that I am actually supposed to be doing. I'm pretty much low man on the totem pole, which is a new position for me, but I really am basically in awe of the people I work with, so that's cool.
So much for what has gone before - now on to the present. There's some inconsistency in the SI prefixes (the metric system stuff - centi and kilo and mega and such) that has been bugging me for a while so I thought I'd complain about it for no particular reason. Most of the prefixes are very logical - they are separated from the others by factors of 1000. The exceptions are centi, deci, deka, and hecto, which are only factors of 10 apart (0.01, 0.1, 10, and 100, respectively.) The "normal" prefixes are, from small to large: yocto, zepto, atto, femto, pico, nano, micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, and yotta.
Of course the prefixes at the extreme ends of the scale are not very common, but there you have it. (I use some of the really small ones at work now, though - ICs and everything on them are fiendishly small.)
Now, here's what bugs me. Note that all of the small prefixes except for milli, centi, and deci end in an "o", and all of the large prefixes except hecto and kilo end in an "a". The reasons are historical and related to the French origins of the original metric system, but we should fix it.
Another annoyance is that all of the small prefix abbreviations are lower case (including micro, which is a lower case Greek letter "mu" or "μ", but which can acceptably be abbreviated as "u"), and all of the large prefixes but deka, hecto, and kilo are abbreviated with upper case letters. Adding insult to injury, deka (which at least ends in an "a" as is fitting for the larger prefixes) is abbreviated "da" - that's right, two letters!
My vote (and as we know, I don't believe my vote counts) would be to eliminate centi, deci, deka, and hecto altogether, and to change "milli" to "millo", "kilo" to "kila", and abbreviate kila as "K", not "k". It is just as easy to say 10 millometers as to say one centimeter. Heights can be given in meters, so we don't need centimeters for that. (1.74m is just as convenient as 174cm.) And the way most people mumble, millometer and kilameter would be pronounced the same as the current words anyway. Ok, well at least the way I mumble.
An aside: there is no more ambiguity between the temperature unit "kelvin" and the prefix kila (both abbreviated "K") then there is currently between the length unit "meter" and the prefix milli (both abbreviated "m"). Only a unit may stand alone; a prefix must always be followed by a unit, and it is not acceptable to use more than one prefix before a unit (i.e., you can't have a micro-nano-meter), so there is no ambiguity.
So there you have it - another pointless idea that won't go anywhere even though it makes as much sense as alphabet/spelling or calendar reform. (I particularly like the calendar that has 13 four week months, all of which start on a Monday (that's 364 days), one day between the last day of the year and the first day of the next year that is not a day of the week, and a similar leap day every four years after the second Sunday and before the third Monday of the seventh month. Pretty similar to a fiscal calendar, I think - but it would put calendar makers out of business.)
One final note - the mail address for ranting back has changed. I waited a little too long between mail checks, and Hotmail shut down that account. So now I use Gmail, which is much better for me anyway (it has free POP access, whereas Hotmail charges for POP access.) Also, the long threatened address change for this site may happen soon. I'll make sure the new site gets registered with Google so you can find it again, if you are so inclined. www.kuzeja.com will continue to refer to it as well.
You can respond to my ranting here.
Give me a millometer, and I'll rant a kilameter.