@atpfm Perhaps to fold into the “metric bit” — let’s do a PSA on everybody’s casual mistake on “hurts” like @caseyliss

Or like this weatherman reading a script about digital transmission: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxGGYK8VNn4BUDg7bZYZ9KnNF53y1e1yMm

This is Dr Heinrich Hertz — don’t worry, he’s 100 years older than you and he only discovered radio waves, but you don’t have to remember his first name, let alone try to say it

You don’t even need to say his last name properly — in German, it might sound like an American says “hats” — and good news, you don’t even have to use a capital “h”!

It’s just “hertz”, but there’s no “hert”. It’s zero hertz, 1 hertz, 2 hertz, however many hertz.

Abbreviation is Hz. (Capital is required).

Out of all of the scientists immortalised into units, I am most jealous for this one — he had the fortune to name a unit of time, albeit an inverse one — but if you’re going to be an inverted fundamental unit, then being an inside-out second of time: that’s pretty cool.

(Meanwhile, the “decibel” named after Alexander Graham Bell is a real mess, a unitless misapplied mess, but if anybody should measure telephonics then it’s pretty cool to be a “bell” just for the nominative determinism) reference: https://youtu.be/U6IKXUUydas

Not Fun Fact: Even though Dr Hertz’s family became Lutheran in the 1830s, decades before his birth, a whole century later the Nasties tried to pull a swift one and change the “Hz” unit into the “Helmholtz”, after another scientist. Professor von Helmholtz had no say in this either, having died a few decades earlier, and might have hated it too — he was into Kant and moral philosophy, closer to Marx if anything.

#Hertz #Hz