There are hundreds of non-technical acronyms on the net, lol (laughing out loud), rofl (rolling on the floor laughing), ttfn (ta-ta for now) etc (et cetera), so maybe it was not so odd when an email correspondent asked me what “db” at the foot of a message stood for. But, then again, the correspondent had emailed me to ask if I were the actor David Bradley (he plays the janitor in the Harry Potter movies). This person obviously knew my name, so what prevented them from making the instant connection, db –> DB –> David Bradley? I don’t honestly know, but I mentioned this to my good buddy Stephan Logan who was not so dumbfounded as he had been when someone called his company to inquire about desktop magnifiers.

This person said they had an 8X magnifier and wondered which would be stronger, the company’s 10X or 14X? Stephan asked him if he was pulling his leg and the customer was dumbstruck…

I suppose there are some numbers that are actually reciprocals with respect to certain properties. The f stop values used in photography. A smaller f means a larger aperture and so a shorter depth of field. Bigger f number means smaller aperture means more depth of field.