[Info-vax] Where is EISNER:: and who funds it?

[Steven Schweda]

> [...] How many Newtons do you weigh?

   Normally, _mass_ is what is measured, not weight (force of gravity,
which depends too much on the environment).

> Dynes and Newtons are pretty much limited to the realm of physicists
> and perhaps some engineers.

   Or any car mechanic with a torque wrench and a metric service manual. 
(Although one written in the US might have goofy values, blindly
converted from foot-pounds.)

   And "Newton" is the man; "newton" is the unit of force.

   My high-school physics teacher drew a healthy-looking stick-figure
horse(?) on the blackboard, and labeled it "cm".  Next to it, he drew a
similarly shaped animal, but on its back, with limp legs, and X's for
eyes, and labeled it "erg".

> Physicists use the positron as the unit of charge. [...]

   No, they use the magnitude of the charge on an electron, just as they
did before the positron was discovered.

> Nuclear and particle physicists use electron volts, usually as keV,
> MeV, GeV, and now TeV, [...]

   Note: "eV", not "pV".  There is no "e" in "positron".

> [...] the reason Americans don't adopt Celsius is the same reason you
> haven't switched from the QWERTY to the Dvorak keyboard.

   Not really.  There's an Engineer Guy movie about the Dvorak keyboard,
by the way:

      http://www.engineerguy.com/failure/dvorak.htm

   Note that SI _did_ take over the world.  (Almost completely.)