“Now, a few words about the cooperation with the IEC and its corresponding technical committee, which is IEC/TC 25. In the beginning, cooperation between the IEC and ISO on the subject of logarithmic quantities and units was not too good. ISO preferred natural logarithms, and the IEC decimal logarithms, and that’s good grounds for a conflict!”
“It is very annoying that there are still differences in the process within the two organizations! Quite a few people, like myself, work in both organizations, and it’s so difficult to remember what are the ISO rules and the IEC rules. Why can’t they have only one set of rules?”
–Anders Thor (Secretary of ISO/TC 12 and ISO/TC 203) in Friendship Amoung Equals: Recollections from ISO’s first fifty years [pdf] (1997)
1. logarithms as contentious subject
2. lack of standardization in two organizations that exist for standardization
Who knew?