[CW] Morse code for ! and #

[Bruce Prior]

We have a Morse code version of the @ character: 
di-dah-dah-di-dah-dit.

There has been a lot of discussion over the years about the need for the exclamation point (!) in International Morse Code and various proposals have been made.

It would also be helpful if the number sign (#) could be rendered in Morse code as well.  I don't know whether that possibility has ever been considered.  

I have proposed that # be made a symbol in the International System of Units, also called SI or the Metric System.  Here is my proposal:




Counting
Entities

          There
are four different scales of quantitative data: ratio, interval, ordinal
and nominal.  Most SI units deal
with measurements at the ratio scale, which have a true zero and a given
ratio of the values relate to true ratio relationships.  For example, a thermodynamic temperature of
1500 kelvins is actually twice as high as 750 kelvins. The system of degrees
Celsius temperatures uses an interval scale, since it depicts true
intervals, but not true ratios.  50
degrees Celsius is not twice as warm as 25 degrees Celsius.  The ordinal scale places data in rank
order, but there is no actual measure of how much a given measure is higher
than another. Ordinal-scale values are often are expressed with descriptions
rather than numbers, like unacceptable,
satisfactory, good and excellent.
The descriptive categories of the old-fashioned RST signal reporting system use
ordinal-scale measures.  

            The nominal scale consists of
simple counts of entities, such as data from the census of a municipality which
could show a population on Census Day of 52 352 people. 
SI has no unit for simple counts of entities.  

            We often see journalistic headlines
like "500K Voters Turn Out for
County Election."  That
expression uses the capital K to represent a multiple of 1000 in a way which
does not conform to SI standards, but the International System of Units does
not offer a standard which does the job properly.  We need an SI unit which deals with nominal
data.

            As changes take place in technology
and society, SI already has an institution, the General Conference on Weights
and Measures (CGPM) in France, which is responsible for negotiating changes to
SI.   Here is a possibility:  The CGPM or the International Committee on
Weights and Measures (CIPM) could create a unit called counts with a symbol #.  With this new SI unit in place, that headline
could read "500 k# Voters Turn Out
for County Election" and be SI-compliant.  The unit name count would not normally be pronounced or written.  The symbol # would typically be used with a multiplier prefix, since it
would represent a simple count of specified nominal-scale entities like vehicles or boxes or
marbles or whatever.  The # symbol would be most useful in
conjunction with large multiples, represented with prefixes like k#, M#, G#, T# and so forth.


73, Bruce Prior N7RR


J. Bruce Prior   853 Alder Street  Blaine, WA 98230-8030  360-332-6046                 • Grid CN88px    • Amateur Radio Station N7RR    • The CW Operators' Club 846   • Washington State SOTA Manager   • Pacific Northwest Trail Association   • American Alpine Club #1672    • SATERN
 		 	   		  
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