Units (geekery)
Apr. 4th, 2005 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenMy co-worker and I are physicist/mathematicians in a workplace made up mostly of biologists and other squishy scientists. As such, we end up helping people with maths & physics problems a lot, and in the course of this we keep discovering more and more painful examples of how little some alleged scientists understand the disciplines they're working with, or even the basic common language of those disciplines.
One of the people we help a lot is B. She's fairly bright, but she has trouble grasping the difference between 'force' and 'pressure', and we have a lot of conversations with her where we explain this and she goes away and then comes back confused. A large part of this seems to be that in the interim, she's been reading papers that abuse these concepts so badly that they drain knowledge like some sort of steroid-bloated head mosquito.
This was brought home to us very painfully recently when B. came in trying to compare results which she'd obtained by hard work and diligent supervised-by-us calculation with somebody else's published data that came with a calibration table.
The data in question was apparently intended to measure pressure. The units they were using were identified merely as 'g/s'. We spent hours on this trying to figure out what this could possibly mean; taken literally, that's "grams per second", which ordinarily would refer to some sort of bulk flow rate. Since nobody in vision sciences except the two of us and our immediate boss seems to understand the distinction between mass and force, we thought it quite likely that the 'g' might really mean "grams-force", i.e. one gram multiplied by one Earth gravity. But even with that substitution, it made no sense whatsoever.
Eventually, B. wrote to the guy who produced this data, and asked him what it meant.
We were right about the 'g'. As for the 's', it stood for 'square centimeter'.
*twitch*
*twitchtwitch*
ARGH!
One of the people we help a lot is B. She's fairly bright, but she has trouble grasping the difference between 'force' and 'pressure', and we have a lot of conversations with her where we explain this and she goes away and then comes back confused. A large part of this seems to be that in the interim, she's been reading papers that abuse these concepts so badly that they drain knowledge like some sort of steroid-bloated head mosquito.
This was brought home to us very painfully recently when B. came in trying to compare results which she'd obtained by hard work and diligent supervised-by-us calculation with somebody else's published data that came with a calibration table.
The data in question was apparently intended to measure pressure. The units they were using were identified merely as 'g/s'. We spent hours on this trying to figure out what this could possibly mean; taken literally, that's "grams per second", which ordinarily would refer to some sort of bulk flow rate. Since nobody in vision sciences except the two of us and our immediate boss seems to understand the distinction between mass and force, we thought it quite likely that the 'g' might really mean "grams-force", i.e. one gram multiplied by one Earth gravity. But even with that substitution, it made no sense whatsoever.
Eventually, B. wrote to the guy who produced this data, and asked him what it meant.
We were right about the 'g'. As for the 's', it stood for 'square centimeter'.
*twitch*
*twitchtwitch*
ARGH!
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-04 01:09 pm (UTC)Gah.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-04 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-04 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-05 12:44 am (UTC)