Talk:Nat (unit)

Re: Merger suggestion

Just delete the other article, and mention the alternative name here if there are references for it. Personally, I've never even heard of a nit. Stanford Goldman calls it a "nepit", a contraction for "neperian [sic] digit". -- 130.94.162.61 23:31, 11 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

counting in and converting to Nat

There is a neat summary: One nat corresponds to about 1.44 bits $\left({\tfrac {1}{\ln 2}}\right)$ , or 0.434 bans $\left({\tfrac {1}{\ln 10}}\right)$ .

But I am still having trouble counting and converting to Nat. What are the digit (Natit) symbols? How many are there? does 1(nat) = e(decimal) What is 2(nat)? help me count to e^3 in nat.

Thanks!--Lbeaumont (talk) 13:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You can count in base e if you want, but you lose some properties of normal bases which you might expect. The biggest one is that there is no canonical representation of a number. To answer your questions: If I remember correctly, sequences of {0,1,2} are sufficient to represent any number base e. 1 is equal to 1 in decimal (1 times e^0), 2 is equal to 2 in decimal. e^3 could be written as 1000.--2003:69:CD03:4301:2E81:58FF:FEFF:8F4B (talk) 21:52, 13 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Natural unit

Why is nat the "natural unit" of entropy? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.19.114.133 (talk) 13:14, 14 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Rename article?

I think this article should be called "Natural Unit of Information". According to the International System of Quantities, the nat is the symbol for this unit, but not its name. Are there sources that say otherwise? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 14:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While I agree with the principle of the name of the article being the same as the name of a unit rather than the symbol, we do not have anything to say that "natural unit of information" is its name, any more than "SI unit of length" is the name of the metre. It would also be atypical in being an extended phrase and thus unlikely to have been nominated by any standards body as the unit name. So I would advocate waiting until someone finds a reference that gives the assigned name of this unit. —Quondum 16:29, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to p19 of IEC 80000-13:2008, the name of the unit is natural unit of information (symbol nat), and the first few hits of this Scholar search are relevant. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 16:41, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Google scholar hits seem to use the phrase, but otherwise seem to give no direct indication that it is the name. I have no access to the IEC standard, but if as you say, it designates that as the name of the unit (as opposed to just calling it that), then it would be natural to rename the article. If there is no officially designated name, then it would also seem reasonable to do the rename. Along the same lines, Ban (unit) could also be merged into Hartley (unit). —Quondum 18:46, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The column headed ‘Name’ on p19 lists one, shannon, hartley and natural unit of information, in that order; the next column is headed ‘Symbol’ and has corresponding entries 1, Sh, Hart and nat. I agree about merging hartley and ban as they appear to be synonyms. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 19:21, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, makes sense. I support a rename (but not with capitals as in your original post), with this article becoming a redirect. —Quondum 21:08, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the capitals are not appropriate - I guess the name should be "Natural unit of information". I confess I do not know how to rename an article myself though. In any case, perhaps we should wait for 24 hours in case others wish to comment? Dondervogel 2 (talk) 21:28, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Good call on waiting. Moving is via the "More" tab at the top of the page (then "Move"). After the move you get some clean-up instructions, fairly straightforward to follow. I could do it if you prefer, but you may want to see how it is done. —Quondum 22:27, 10 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the explanation. It seems to work. Dondervogel 2 (talk) 20:37, 11 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Too bad that I was recovering from Wikimania, and didn't see this discussion until now. I would prefer bit, byte, nat and ban to be used for the names, because they make a set of analogous short similar words, and I think in practice they're what is more usable (and more used) -- so many nats of information, in the same way that we might say so many metres in length. And I do see nat is the analogue of "metre", rather than the analogue of "m." It's perhaps worth noting that throughout the body-text of this article, we use the word "nat" throughout to talk about the quantity, because "natural unit of information" is just too much of a mounthful. So it is simply not correct that "nat" is only used as the symbol.

As for the IEC, what standards bodies say should have "a vote, not a veto" (as the saying goes) in discussions like this. For example for Gibbs free energy, the IUPAC recommendation is "Gibbs function" or "Gibbs energy", which was considered by the community, but in the end the traditional term was preferred, as being more common term, much more widely used, and more expressive, capturing the relatedness to other forms of free energy.

The final point I would make is that "Natural unit of information" sounds like the title of an essay. ('So, Smithers, what is the most natural unit for a measure of information?' -- a question which in fact we don't even answer). On the other hand "nat" has the short crispness that is characteristic of names of units, so conveys much better that this is going to be an article about a unit. Jheald (talk) 08:01, 12 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]