Re:History of energy consumption in the United States, 1775–...
by lotsofpulp on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @08:53PM
(#29818112)
The US convention is capital C Calorie is supposed to be kilocalorie and lowercase calorie is supposed to need regular calorie.
It is a poor convention, I assume brought about by marketing purposes.
Then we have kilo-tonne, which could be a unit of weight (I wonder why mega-gram never became a thing in stead of the tonne) but is usually the explosive power of an equal amount of TNT.
And none of the above had any of the American eccentrism we all love to make fun of, which have in addition to the aforementioned BTU have their own foot-pound and foot-ounce (when I pound on your door I exert a force of around 4.5 newtons on your door; and my ounce of strength is just one-sixteenth of that force).