Media mistakes

[gomezz]

Listening to this week's In Our Time about life in the universe one of the experts said a new 39M telescope would be four times larger than the currently largest 10M telescope. Surely it would be sixteen time larger, even more if you take the curvature of the dish into account?

 

[prpr]

Larger in diameter or larger in area? Just saying larger without clarification of what property they were talking about is not useful.
And what is M anyway? Do you mean metres, which is m? (Yes it does matter.)

 

[Black Hole]

a new 39M telescope would be four times larger than the currently largest 10M telescope.

Probably for AvP this, but no – that's four times as large (give or take), or three times larger.

Yes it has 16x the light gathering power, but that's not so important at these scales. The important bit is resolution, which is proportional to diameter not area.

 

[gomezz]

And what is M anyway? Do you mean metres, which is m? (Yes it does matter.)

You are right of course and I am always irritated when I see them get mixed up as a scaling prefix: M for Mega and m for milli. In this case mixing up (m)etre with (M)olar concentration I see as less likely to cause confusion for the average reader.

 

[prpr]

I am always irritated when I see them get mixed up as a scaling prefix

I was uploading something to Dropbox the other day and the upload status window said "mb" and elsewhere on the page it said "MB". Both were clearly the same unit, just some ignorant idiot programmer couldn't be bothered to do it right. Not the first time I've had cause to complain to them about something.

 

[EEPhil]

mb

A milli-bit? WTF?

Whilst double checking b/B I came across https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z6qqmsg/revision/1 which seems to imply that a KB and a KiB are the same thing (1024 bytes). Shirley this is not correct. (I get confused, I come from an era when K was 1024 for computing and 1000 for everything else. Now K is 1000 and Ki is 1024, I think - although I'm not sure Micro$oft see it that way)

 

[antipodean]

A milli-bit? WTF?

Whilst double checking b/B I came across https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z6qqmsg/revision/1 which seems to imply that a KB and a KiB are the same thing (1024 bytes). Shirley this is not correct. (I get confused, I come from an era when K was 1024 for computing and 1000 for everything else. Now K is 1000 and Ki is 1024, I think - although I'm not sure Micro$oft see it that way)

Technically it needs to be a lower case k, as an upper case is for temperature in Kelvin.

I can never remember if it is k for 1000, and ki for 1024 or the other way around (I think I have it correct as k is normally 1000), but when it gets to Mb vs MB and on up through the GB and TB I can never remember which is bytes and which is bits, let alone worrying about which is the 1000 multiplier and which is the 1024 multiplier.

 

[EEPhil]

Technically it needs to be a lower case k, as an upper case is for temperature in Kelvin.

Fair point that I missed. The BBC got that one wrong as well! Perhaps BBC Verify needs to do some fact checking.

 

[Black Hole]

Glossary, entry KiB.

I can never remember which is bytes and which is bits

Shirley not that hard to remember? "b" is smaller that "B".

 

[EEPhil]

Shirley not that hard to remember? "b" is smaller that "B".

I could remember that, but had doubts. Things change and sometimes, if one doesn't check, one ends up with œuf sur le visage (not in the Prescott sense).

Glossary, entry KiB.

Learn something new every day!

 

[gomezz]

Glossary, entry KiB.


Shirley not that hard to remember? "b" is smaller that "B".

But how much smaller is not fixed. I have worked with six bit bytes and nine bit bytes in my time. Anyone with the right background can name that hardware platform.

 

[Black Hole]

I have worked with six bit bytes and nine bit bytes in my time.

Were they called "bytes" though? We used to call a general unit comprising n bits a "word". Typically our minicomputers had 24-bit words.

 

[gomezz]

Words can be subdivided into bytes.

 

[Black Hole]

Words can be subdivided into bytes.

In more recent contexts, yes. We also had 18-bit words.

 

[gomezz]

I am talking about an architecture that originated in the early 1960s.

 

[EEPhil]

I only remember a byte being 8-bits, a nibble 4-bits and a word being a variable feast. At least this was taught in lectures c1980. Later use of assemblers and C compilers confirmed that. I also remember having to refer to 16-bit word or 32-bit word

 

[Black Hole]

a nibble 4-bit

Nybble, but that seems to have fallen into disuse.

 

[EEPhil]

Nybble, but that seems to have fallen into disuse.

I don't think I've got the original lecture handout to check. I don't remember that spelling. Wikipedia confirms the alternate spelling.

 

[Black Hole]

Actually, I like "nybl"!