I agree with all who think tangling a prefix into the foundation of the system is needlessly irritating and amounts to a defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
My vote is to replace the “kilogram” with the “Einstein”, a mass unit of equal size. I don’t especially like calling it the “grave” even if that’s where Einstein is now, but it would still be better than the present situation.
Also, let’s let the kilo- prefix be abbreviated with “K” rather than “k” so that all larger multipliers are uppercase and all smaller ones lowercase.
Also, let’s replace the Greek lowercase Mu with the similar looking lowercase “u” so that all English computer character sets include a prefix for one millionth.
Finally, I propose that when talking about luminosity and lumens, the K and M and G multipliers suddenly become 1002, and 1,000,002, and 1,000,000,002, and so forth. This takes care of the issue that all unit systems apparently need some blindingly stupid nonsensical feature that threatens to mess up all hope of neat, tidy, predictable usage. However, it does so by spoiling an entire category of units that nobody cares about, which is actually sort of cheating.
Abfarads, statfarads, and dynes/cm[sup]2[/sup] aren’t any better. No matter what units you start with, something will be way too big or way too small.
I say give up.
Any sane system of electrical units is inevitably going to have most of them be a really awkward size. We have a system where the volt is a practical size, and to a lesser extent the amp and the ohm, but the price we pay for that is that the coulomb, Tesla, and Farad are all too big for most purposes. We could instead have constructed a system where the coulomb is a practical size, but then all the rest would be inconvenient, and so on.
Can’t do that; there’s already a unit called an “Einstein”. It’s a really obscure temperature unit that hardly anyone ever uses, but you can’t (or rather, shouldn’t) use the same name for two different units.
Eh, lumens are already silly. SI already has a perfectly good unit for luminosity: The watt. The only thing that makes lumens not really power units is that you’re passing the light through a frequency filter that roughly corresponds to the response of the human eye, but that’s way too arbitrary to consider it a fundamental unit. Likewise, we could scratch the mole off the list, too, and just give numbers (what’s the matter, chemists, afraid of scientific notation?).
A CAD simulation I ran last week returned an answer in mdB (millidecibels). But what else could it do when the base unit is dB? Personally I’d have made the Bel 10X smaller, and I never have been happy with the kg as a base unit, it just doesn’t sit right. Mind, no-one calls a ton a Mg…
When I was a sophomore E.E. student, our lab equipment was all geared to five volts. The capacitors were mostly in the microfarad and millifarad range. They looked like coin-sized discs with two wires coming out of one edge.
One day, we came into the lab and found a cylindrical object, slightly smaller than a beer can. On one end, in fine print was a number. I don’t remember the exact number. It was either “900 mF”, or “1100 mF”. For the first time in our lives, we saw a capacitor that was on the order of one farad!
So, naturally, we put five volts across it, and then used a piece of steel plate to short the terminals. The spark melted a notch into the steel. We went home very happy, that day.
Never did find out where it came from, or what happened to it afterward.
