Units and Dimensions must be enforced, or the world, including whole countries, will likely fall apart
Units and Dimensions by Rajaram Nityananda at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCwJuZloV0c
If you are going to teach units, you should prepare them for a lifetime. Do not teach them how to use units as they are used now. Teach then how to look for and document units. And to prefer sources and groups who use units well. A paper or equations without units is laziness on the part of ill-trained workers, authors, editors, groups. No matter their discipline, no matter their pay-grade. On the Internet there are many units, and worse there are units and methods in most human languages.
Your common way of introducing and memorizing units in your country and culture is part of the baggage all children and adults have to carry. If you and others all teach units casually, with “we will get to it one day” attitude, that is embedded in your whole society, economy, industries, methods, books, papers, videos, classes, words, stories and cases. For the Internet Foundation, I changed “Systeme Internationale” to “Standard Internet” and, there, all quantities must have units. The Internet browser, servers, sites, systems, apps and software — ALL must handle that for the humans. And the new AIs who are much less capable of reasoning than new humans.
There are some really wonderful new industries and technologies that are crippled because the groups and people involved at illiterate regarding units, comparisons, standards. If you see “standards groups” not sharing their “standards” or units and measurement methods – they are trying to control by hoarding and controlling the most basic tools for doing science technology engineering mathematics computing finance accounting and quantitative fields.
If you see papers and groups forcing “dimensionless” methods on others, they are doing it strictly for control, pride and laziness. The proper way for those situations is to, where used, each symbol or variable or words or value must immediately give the denominator, the reference value. If there is some speed of light nonsense, put it there and have the computer give the proper methods – so ALL can see, without having to memorize it, or having to find it and sort it out. The time wasted in all human society because groups who used to know each other and “everyone is trained the same and memorized the same stuff” ==> no longer works, in a world with 8.1 Billion humans, of which 5.4 Billion are using the Internet in hundreds of human languages and tens of thousands of domain specific languages for professions and clusters of workers.
Those vaunted “AIs” are horrible with units. In fact none of them can actually add, subtract, multiply and divide properly. Most of that is because they scabbed the free information from the internet, which is full of ads, self promoting groups, mistakes and guesses. Most of the abbreviations for units are wrong, or too short and ambiguous. Those kinds of AIs are not dedicated and smart enough to resolve that. And humans should not be required to resolve from scratch when once and for all humans and groups – the rules, values and methods can be stored in computer memories and applied consistently for all. Things that took humans centuries to sort out and refine, cannot be discovered by a few bad examples on the Internet, especially there are NO guides or rule for posting knowledge on the Internet.
Filed as (Units and Dimensions must be enforced, or the world, including whole countries , will likely fall apart)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
