[UNITS] Re: Dimensionless units

[Jesus J. Salgado]

Brian Thomas wrote:

>  For the purposes of dimensional analysis, all of these represent separate
>  dimensions I would think, (with the exception of "bit" and "byte" which 
>  surely belong to the same 'number of' dimension and differ by a scale factor 
>  of '8'). There may be other connections that one may make between the 
>  'noun' dimensions (as you refer to them) above, depending on the experiment
>  (for example bin equivalent pixel in cases).
> 
>  

That's the way it works.

Using separate dimensions, you can handle this kind of dimensionless
numbers. Doing that, you can eliminate many units from your problem as
the already mentioned bit or byte using scaling factors or rad, deg
(pi/180 rad), arcmin (pi/180/60 rad), arcsec (pi/180/3600 rad), mas
(pi/180/3600000 rad)... using only one as a reference and scaling
factors between them.

Cheers,
-- 
Jesus J. Salgado


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