In school or even before that we've all learned that K (disregard the letter case for the moment) stands for kilo, the factor thousand. There are kilograms, kilometers, kilowatts, and many more. No surprises there.

Those who paid attention in their physics classes, may remember that, according to the International System of Units, the letter K (again, ignore the case) also stands for Kelvin, the temperature unit.

A little more than fifty years ago, a number of bright people with outstanding foresight and a natural dislike for confusion decided to come up with a system that would give each unit their own, unique, symbol.

These people had a heart for electric engineers who, on a daily basis, work with very small capacitances in the order of 0.000000000001 farad and many other engineers lacking time and motivation to count zeros till the end of days. So they decided to standardize a list of unit prefixes that can be used to multiply those units by powers of 10.

Given the large number of units and prefixes compared to the small number of letters in our alphabet, they paid close attention not to introduce any ambiguities. Some abbreviations were defined single-letter, others multi-letter. Some were made uppercase, some lowercase. Simple, yet brilliant!

To the honor of the great physicist Lord Kelvin, they made the abbrevition for Kelvin uppercase: K. This left them with a lowercase k for kilo. So far, so good, confusion averted.

Now, some fifty years later, a shockingly large group of people decided to throw caution to wind and started mixing the abbreviations for Kelvin and kilo--blissfully ignorant of what their forefathers had achieved. The KB, or Kelvinbyte, was born.

I pride myself on my interest in physics and a solid knowledge of the necessary basics, but, as hard as I tried, I haven't found a single useful application for a Kelvinbyte. So, please help me out and throw in your theories. I know they're out there.