The author's whole point is that this is not true.
To adapt your analogy, it's not like being mad at the number three, it's like being mad about people not attaching any units to the number three, arguing that it's clear in context. It isn't!
In virtually any other situation, leaving off units and counting on context to fill them in would be considered to be at the extreme end of unacceptable.
The unit problems in question, are only accepted because they are an historically created anomaly. Not because they are a good idea, or anyone wanted that outcome.
No. We've painstakingly figured out the right answer to this through the generations of doing science and engineering: You always specify units.
> The Software Interface Specification (SIS), used to define the format of the AMD file, specifies the units associated with the impulse bit to be Newton-seconds (N-s). Newton seconds are the proper units for impulse (Force x Time) for metric units. The AMD software installed on the spacecraft used metric units for the computation and was correct. In the case of the ground software, the impulse bit reported to the AMD file was in English units of pounds (force)-seconds (lbf-s) rather than the metric units specified.
From https://llis.nasa.gov/llis_lib/pdf/1009464main1_0641-mr.pdf
I am lost. What fields you are talking about?
1. I am unaware of any field operating within its own echo/context chamber using unit-less numeric notation for anything but actual unit-less quantities. Except for informal slap-dash arithmetic, on trivial calculations.
2. Units indicate the dimension being measured, not just the relative magnitude within that dimension. Nobody is going to know from any shared context, except in person, what a bare number measures.
3. Virtually every measurable quantity has multiple possible units of different relative magnitude, depending on micro context, so even people within a field, who agree on the dimension measured, still need units. Meters, light years, AU, angstroms?
4. You cannot apply standard formulas of physics, or anything else, without specific units. Formulas operate on dimensions, but to interpret and calculate any numbers, you need to know the specific unit being used for each dimension.
(In any context, but a late night napkin argument between two well acquainted colleagues in a bar, units are universally used. And in that case, the opportunity for serious misunderstandings is more likely to be from missing units, than the quantity of scotch each has imbibed, or how much they have spilled on the napkin.)
“How old is your son?” “He’s 3.”
Clear in context. People write things like dB SPL (A-weighted) in spec sheets because spec sheets benefit from being unambiguous. Most of the time it’s really clear, like you’re talking about insertion loss or amplifier gain and there’s only one reasonable way to interpret it.
On detailed spec sheets they list the gain of amplifiers as xxx dB.
There are places specificity is necessary, and there are places the implicit assumptions people make are specific, and only need additional specification if the implication is violated. That's how language works - shortcuts everywhere, even with really important things, because people figure it out. There are also lots of examples of this biting people in the ass - it doesn't always work, even if most of the time, it does.
3 days, weeks, months or years are ironically all common units when someone is "3".
dB for anyone not already knowing the answer is like going to another planet and hearing "he's 3". Of course it's on a logarithmic scale, offset to -5 as starting point, counting the skin shedding events - clear in context and you should've known that.
I just don’t remember encountering the problem you’re describing, and it’s unfamiliar to me. There’s something about your experience that I don’t understand, but I don’t know what it is.
But this comment doesn’t illustrate your point, and I still don’t really understand where you’re seeing this.
But these are totally different. I'm used to and thus comfortable with lots of things that are nonetheless terrible!
The voltage / power example doesn’t make sense. It’s always power or voltage squared, which are equivalent when the load is resistive.
For instance, I've heard loudness of sounds described in decibels for my whole life, and first saw the actual units people are describing when I read this article and thread today.
I don't think either of your parent's paths say that:
> There are two paths: "it was weird but then I got used to it, you're just ignorant" or "it was weird, I got used to it, but we should improve the situation". I know which side I want to be on. Even if it takes decades like the data SI prefixes.
I believe that they're saying that, yes, experts get used to it, after which it makes complete sense (as would any arbitrary but consistent convention, once you got used to it), but, in any living field, there will constantly be non-experts looking to become experts. If there is a way to make the process easier for them while not introducing any lack of precision that would hamper experts, then why not?
If you every find an "official" written document that uses dB not as attenuation/gain and is not specifying the reference (at least in a footnote), it's written either by idiots or for idiots, or both.
A-weighting describes how different frequencies are summed up. It’s like saying “RMS”. RMS is not units, A-weighting is not units. You can apply A weighting to voltage, digital signals, or audio. They all have different units but can all be A-weighted.
You could invent a new unit for A-weighted audio, but you would need several.
How about velocity? What's 0 m/s? What does it mean to be absolutely still? All motion is relative, and being still is entirely a matter of perspective. You might be sitting still on a train, but traveling very quickly relative to a cow standing still while you blow by.
Bels are a relative measure that confuse some because they pop up in different contexts that seem unrelated. However, they are useful when dealing with quantities for which most pertinent relationships are exponential. e.g. They work for sound because humans perceive exponential increases in volume in a linear fashion. Something that is 3dB louder is twice as loud in terms of pressure levels, but we only perceive it as a little bit louder. Sound pressure levels are both relative measures and an attempt to reflect human perception . That makes them, necessarily, a bit odd.