It all sounds like Fluorescent Nanoscale Optical Resonance Detection to me. 
Seriously, bravo for some great coinages. I’ll get the SDSAB working on those tomorrow.
Almost is true. a decibel is 1/10 the standard unit of sound intensity - the bel
That’s sure the exception that proves the rule.
I can’t think of a corresponding deca- exception.
That’s all we need. Another dam SI unit
US GSA recommendation is that (metric) building dimensions always be in millimeters.
SI drawings preferably use only millimeters (mm) to avoid fractions and to eliminate the repetitious suffix. The following note on drawings will avoid confusion: “ALL DIMENSIONS ARE MILLIMETERS (mm) UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.”
SI specifications have used mm for almost all measurements, even large ones. Use of mm is consistent with dimensions in major codes, such as the National Building Code (Building Officials and Code Administrators International, Inc.) and the National Electric Code (National Fire Protection Association).
Use of mm leads to integers for all building dimensions and nearly all building product dimensions, so use of the decimal point is almost completely eliminated. Even if some large dimensions seem to have many digits there still will usually be fewer pencil or CAD strokes than conventional English Dimensioning
No problem with a drawing that says your building is 541,000 tall (with millimeters implied). Not sure about EU standards.
Now that’s cool! I had no idea.
If big buildings are dimensioned in hundreds of thousands of mms, then 1850 mms for a mere human is just great.
I was taught woodworking in millimetres - even big pieces of wood - not sure why this is the tradition. I judge my height by centimetres (mostly because I am 1cm short of 6 feet…).
All other measurements are fairly normal metric, km/h, etc. I’m a little bewildered why the US retains Imperial units, especially as Ben Franklin was in Paris, just after the Revolution when metric was made obligatory.
(Except for time, a weird outlier. The 10 hour day never made it past the planning phase. I blame the project manager)
It is because many workers can’t move the decimal point, can’t handle decimal fractions, can’t compare meters to mm etc.
I don’t know how this works in French. I’ve always wondered if ‘milli-’ and ‘kilo-’ are just their way of saying ‘thousandth’ and ‘thousand’.
Lots of things used to be specified in thousandths of an inch in Australia (for example, length of a car), so that manufacturing wouldn’t have to do unit conversions. That’s still the case: it’s mm, so that manufacturing doesn’t have to do unit conversions. In theory ‘decimal conversions are easier’, but in practice, ‘easier’ isn’t ‘easy’, and the problem is avoided by doing all measurements in mm.
decathelon = 10 sports. Except that not really a unit of measure.
I’ve bought wine and beer by the decilitre in bars in Europe, not pints, as God intended beer to be measured.
Both are adapted from classic languages, not French.
I think I love you.
“Deci-” is used in “Decimate”, although usually not literally (the original meaning of the word is “kill one out of every ten”).
When we ran spill drills on the boat, radiation levels were always measured in micro-microcuries. (Which always made me wonder why the curie was such a lage measurement.)
Is that always measured at three levels?
Because Madame Curie was such a large figure in atomic history?
Speaking of unusual units of measurement, the field of medicine has its share, including:
Drop (gtt)—from Latin gutta, is still used in prescriptions (especially eye or ear drops). Roughly 0.05 mL.
Grain (gr)—An old unit equal to 64.8 mg. Still seen in meds like aspirin (e.g., “5-grain” = ~325 mg).
Dram (dr)—A unit of mass in the avoirdupois system. Apothecaries’ unit: 1 dram ≈ 1.77 g (solid) or 3.55 mL (liquid).
International Unit (IU)—Measures biological activity of substances (like insulin, vitamin D). Not based on weight or volume, but effect. Varies wildly between substances.
Body Surface Area (BSA) in m²—Used to calculate chemo doses and kidney function.
Hounsfield Units (HU) (named after Sir Godfrey Hounsfield)—CT scan measure of radiodensity. (Water = 0 HU, air = -1000 HU, bone = +1000 HU)
Centrigray (cGy)—Radiation dosage unit. 1 cGy = 1 rad = 0.01 Gray. Used in oncology.
Extratopically, at our family game night last sunday, we played One Word. Decathlon was the word to be guessed. Our youngest guessed it correctly from only two clues: Unfoley and Ten.
I don’t think the smoot has any particular medical application, unfortunately.
You left out the funniest part about the story:
Smoot graduated from MIT in 1962, … He served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute from 2001 to 2002,[8] and then as president of the International Organization for Standardization from 2003 to 2004.[1][9] Neither organization has provided a standard value for the smoot.