[mikethedruid]

This whole nano-farad thing is an innovation in terminology of the past decade or so. We always used to use just micro-farad, and micro-micro farad, which some innovative fool decided to rename pico-farad in the late 1960s. This latest, nano-farad, is one of those innovations which some other fool came up with to justify their existence, and which was not really needed. I think part of it is that these new digital displays on a lot of meters are only 3 1/2 digits, and couldn't deal with the span between mfd and mmfd, and so they stuck in nf between them because it was cheaper than adding more digits to the displays. So now, instead of just converting between mfd and mmfd like we used to, and which most of us could do in our heads by now, we have to convert between 3 different ranges. What a pain in the a&&.