[HN Gopher] Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes... ___________________________________________________________________ Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in Author : leephillips Score : 154 points Date : 2022-11-18 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (phys.org) (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org) | rnhmjoj wrote: | Is anyone seriously using prefixes above Giga, besides for | counting bytes or boasting numbers in popular science articles? | | In physics, in practice you either state the number in | exponential notation and don't care abut it or for brevity | introduce a more appropriate unit: barns (10-28 m2) and | electronvolts (10-19 J) in nuclear physics or solar mass (~1030 | kg) in astrophysics, etc. | picometer wrote: | Terawatts come to mind. | Symbiote wrote: | Electricity production for a country is reasonable measured in | TWh, and I think I've seen this in newspapers discussing | energy/gas in Europe. | | But from Wikipedia: | | > In the United Kingdom ... Demand for electricity in 2014 was | 34.42 GW on average (301.7 TWh over the year) coming from a | total electricity generation of 335.0 TWh. | | We aren't there yet for power: | | > The synchronous grid of Continental Europe is the largest | synchronous electrical grid (by connected power) in the world. | ... In 2009, 667 GW of production capacity was connected to the | grid | jdrek1 wrote: | > electronvolts (10-19 J) in nuclear physics | | CERN is at TeV ranges so yes, even in different units we use | high prefixes. Might not come up in your every day small talk | but they are used. | traxys wrote: | In High Performance Computing the most recent Top1 machine ils | counted in Exaflops, so there's quite some talk aubout exascale | computing. | burkaman wrote: | > counting bytes or boasting numbers in popular science | articles | | Why are these not serious usages? They are concepts that need | to be communicated, that's what words are for. | xboxnolifes wrote: | Boasting in popular science articles with large prefixes is | hardly better communication compared to scientific notation. | If the prefixes aren't commonly used (anything above | tera/peta really isn't), then the majority of people have no | frame of reference for what it is any more than it being "a | big number". | texaslonghorn5 wrote: | petawatt laser | zardo wrote: | Now that we have 10, will the next set just repeat? E.g. | kiloquettagrams, megaquettameters | wolfi1 wrote: | I'm disappointed that hella has not become a prefix | standardUser wrote: | I'm glad they saved us from that ridiculous terminology. It | reminds me of Futurama, where every-freaking-thing had to be | some pun or weak reference. | tmtvl wrote: | You'd be surprised how many erstwhile lame puns our daily | conversation includes. Ever use the term "nothing"? | frob wrote: | I'll give the grad students at UC Davis props for trying: | https://theaggie.org/2010/02/18/uc-davis-student-gives- | hella.... | | My lab at the time slipped hella- into a few conference | presentations here and there. We had to back our university. I | always remember it getting a few chuckles. | rikkipitt wrote: | The way I remember Earth's approximate mass is the fact it's 10 | times Avogadro's number in kg. | | My physics teacher always had a great way of drilling in these | tidbits. | vitiral wrote: | Take ten moles of earth, fire, wind and water. What do you | have? Captain planet! | opwieurposiu wrote: | Yes and the circumference of the earth is about 40 million | meters. This is because a meter was originally supposed to be | 1/10E6 the distance from the equator to the north pole through | Paris. | Someone wrote: | Nitpick: 1/107, not 1/106. They picked the power of ten that | gave a reasonably-sized unit of length. | | They also made things complex by then picking a unit of mass | that's inconsistent with that: a gram isn't the mass of 1m3 | of water, but of 1/106 m3 of water (a cubic meter is 103 | liters, and a liter of water weighs 103 grams) | | Centimeter-gram-second | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimetre-gram- | second_system_...) really is superior in that sense (but of | course, that's relative to the arbitrary choice of using | water to convert between mass and volume, and from that, | length) | SJSque wrote: | 10E6 = 10x106 = 107, so you can unpick that nit! | Someone wrote: | Yep! | divbzero wrote: | Earth's circumference around the poles is now given as | 40,007.863 km [1]. So when the French Academy of Sciences | defined the metre in the 1790s [2] the distance they measured | from equator to North Pole was off by less than 2 km. | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_circumference | | [2]: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition | Normille wrote: | >o their 1793 measurement of the distance from the equator | to the North Pole was off by less than 2 km.... | | Or, like a lot of people, the Earth's put on a bit of | wieght in the intervening 200+ years | thrwaway298 wrote: | I have read that the atronomers at the time actually knew | that they were a bit off due to a mistake that was done by | one of them. | | They spent several years making lots of smaller | measurements that were added up. | | Each measurement was done twice to ensure correctness. One | of the distances had two conflicting measurements, but due | to a war, they could not return to make a third measurement | and had to just choose one of them (the wrong one). | | They chose not to tell anyone because they feared | politicians would use it to discredit the metric system. | mncharity wrote: | > The way I remember Earth's approximate mass is | | For me, it's: Earth is a blue marble - in "Mega-view" (Mm | zoomed to mm) - with a diameter of a baker's dozen Megameters. | The volume of a ball is one half of its enclosing box, so | that's ~(1E7)^3 or 1E21 m^3. Earth is rock (3 Mg/m^3) and iron | (8 Mg/m^3) and averages 5 Mg/m^3. Or just bracket it - | water,lead,gold is ~ 1,10,20 Mg/m^3). Giving an Earth mass of | 5E24 kg. Actual value 6E24 kg. Brackets of water and lead give | 1E24 to 11E24 kg. | | > a great way of drilling in these tidbits | | For me it's: Arm-sized, hand-sized, fingernail-sized, and | "tiny"-sized, are 1000, 100, 10, and 1 mm. Zooming these by | 1000^n gives scale-model "views". Mega-view with planet balls, | kilo-view with cities in your palm, meter-view with buildings | in hand, micro-view with red blood cell M&M's (yum), nano-view | with virus balls (chewy shell, stringy inside), pico-view with | H2O bumpy basketballs, femto-view with nuclei marbles. It's | easier to remember how big things are, once they're toy-sized, | and you've handled and played with them. | | Just something I crafted years back. Resulting videos didn't | seem to user test well. I was set to dust it off, doing rapid | iterative development over gorilla street usability testing... | in Spring 2020. Ah well. | ThePowerOfFuet wrote: | Gold. | zem wrote: | nice. filing it alongside the pi * 10^7 seconds in a year | [deleted] | [deleted] | hinkley wrote: | Pssh. Only 6 ronnagrams? That's barely a planet at all. | jl6 wrote: | So RB and QB for ronnabyte and quettabyte? What system could be | described at that scale? Does Google store quettabytes of data? | | Considering Seagate is shipping only 155EB (=0.000000000155QB) of | storage per quarter[0], reaching the QB scale seems a way off. | | [0] | https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2022/08/21/c2q-2022... | rg2004 wrote: | Dandy. A memento of the corona virus | throwaway81523 wrote: | Are you telling me that a Ronnagram isn't a message from Ron, | delivered by Western Union? And for stuff like the mass of the | earth, why not 6e27 kg or whatever it is, instead of these weird | incantations? Ugh. | [deleted] | IvyMike wrote: | A couple of decades and several jobs ago I wrote some file | transfer code that displayed human readable sizes, and as a joke | to myself, I included prefixes up to yottabytes. Careful readers | of the code should have flagged this as impossible because | anything above exa- is impossible using 64 bits, but it got thru | review and as far as I know the code lives on to this day. I'm | hoping someone adds these new prefixes. | masswerk wrote: | Having this out of the way, it's time to address the short scale | versus long scale issue. _(ducks)_ ;-) | NeoTar wrote: | That's been addressed. In English you use the short scale. | Other languages use whichever scale they want. | ryzvonusef wrote: | Quetta (10^30) is also the name of a city in Pakistan | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetta | temptemptemp111 wrote: | halosghost wrote: | Would be nice if it linked to the actual document. See Resolution | 3 in the resolutions document [0]. | | [0]: | https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-20... | illys wrote: | Pretty nice table here: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix | | _" (...) he had the idea for the update when he saw media | reports using unsanctioned prefixes for data storage such as | brontobytes and hellabytes. (...)"_ and _" The only letters that | were not used for other units or other symbols were R and Q"_ | | So it seems the new prefixes are partly initiated by the | exponential computer storage needs rather than scientific needs. | So they might need to move again soon. However the SI has | exhausted the available stock of letters. Maybe Greek letters | next time like micro for 10^-6. | | Anyway does it really matter for IT people? I have seen so many | people mixing up bit and byte, milli- and mega- as well. There | are countless usages of mb all over the Internet to express MB. | iquerno wrote: | The only use cases I have seen for units larger than 'petabyte' | are those representing the maximum allowed file sizes for ZFS, | Btrfs and such. I also don't see a point in inventing more | prefixes so that statisticians don't have to use scientific | notation for large numbers. What use is that? How many people | know how much a yottabyte is? If they need to Google the | answer, that defeats the point. | | 1e12 terabytes seems easier to digest than 1 whatever-the- | hell-,-I-don't-know-what-this-unit-is-meant-to-represent-byte. | Not to mention, easier to read. | Spivak wrote: | Yes but translate this statement to the 80s and you might | have said the same about giga. | saltcured wrote: | Hmm, why would you mix 1e12 terabytes instead of saying 1e24 | bytes? Why do we talk about 200k USD salaries instead of 2e5 | USD? Or why isn't a US postage stamp marked as 6e-1 USD? | | Also: in the past 25 years, "tera-scale" (TB and TFLOP) went | from a prognostication about future high-performance | computing into something you find in affordable consumer | products. When campus computing centers are now deploying | hundreds of petabytes, it seems myopic to think the PB | threshold is anything but a signpost flying by the window... | rjbwork wrote: | >200k USD salaries instead of 2e5 USD? | | You mean 2 lakh USD? | | :D | gregmac wrote: | Do we need to have a single letter? Is it acceptable to combine | prefixes? | | Eg: 1 QB (quettabyte) == 1,000,000 YB (yottabytes) == 1 MYB | (mega-yottabyte) | | Without the new prefixes, we could have gone to 1 YYB (1,000,00 | 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or | 10^48 bytes) | allanrbo wrote: | That is almost like reinventing something like Roman numerals | :-) Maybe better to stick with 1e48 notation after all. | GenerocUsername wrote: | Quick, someone tell the guy behind universal paperclips | giantg2 wrote: | Title sounds like the basis for a yo momma joke. | homonculus1 wrote: | Earth weighs 0.6 yomommagrams | rcoveson wrote: | Why is yomomma- a prefix to grams? That doesn't imply yo' | momma so fat, it implies yo' momma _so_. | homonculus1 wrote: | Because that's where the rhyme is, dummy. | Aardwolf wrote: | I guess that gives us new binary prefixes as well, we can now | express data sizes in robibit, quebibit, robibyte and quebibyte! | joeyh wrote: | Will need an update to IEC 80000-13 won't it? Or does the | standard define a formula to derive the names from the metric | prefixes? | NKosmatos wrote: | From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system : | | "The SI has been adopted as the official system of weights and | measures by all nations in the world except for Myanmar, Liberia, | and the United States." | Normille wrote: | The US has adopted new equivalents for these: the _eleventy- | billion-squillion-sixty-fourths of an inch_ and the _super- | awesome-home-run-pound-quart_ | GordonS wrote: | > eleventy-billion-squillion-sixty-fourths of an inch | | Or, for short, the Freedom Inch! | kyawzazaw wrote: | We use the Metric System quite frequently in Myanmar. | Symbiote wrote: | If you can find official and unofficial references, it would | be helpful to allow the article to be updated. | wnevets wrote: | Except the US uses the Metric system | | > U.S. customary units have been defined in terms of metric | units since the 19th century, and the SI has been the | "preferred system of weights and measures for United States | trade and commerce" since 1975 according to United States | law.[1] | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... | [deleted] | anonporridge wrote: | Indirectly false. | | Even though we don't use metric directly in most cases in the | US, the US customary units have long been rebased to be defined | by metric units. | | Inches and pounds are just centimeters and newtons walking | around in a whacky outfit. | kibwen wrote: | Specifically, this happened in 1893: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order | kevin_thibedeau wrote: | The inch wasn't converted to a derived metric unit in the | US until 1959. This creates an issue for precision | machinery manufactured before the redefinition because the | slight difference is enough to matter where allowed to | accumulate. | unwind wrote: | Well, isn't that by definition true for any system of | measurements? I mean, as long as we're talking about a simple | straight-line distance in some real-dimensional space, it's | going to be possible to measure that distance in meters (or | yards, or whatever). Yes I know about fractal lengths, | coastlines and so on. | | I think the point is that the US customary units are | typically used in a very different way, with fractions being | _way_ more important than in metric. See the image in this | [1] article that talks about drill sizes for DIY use, for | instance. You guys go like "oh no the 5/16:ths hole is too | small, I'll step up to 19/64ths that should do it". Over here | in metric-world we go more like "oh no the 7.9 mm drill was | too small, I'll step up to 8 mm". | | Again, the fact that it's easy to convert the 5/16:ths to | 7.9375 mm is not the point, the point is how the | decimal/metric units are used in practice. | aidenn0 wrote: | > Well, isn't that by definition true for any system of | measurements? I mean, as long as we're talking about a | simple straight-line distance in some real-dimensional | space, it's going to be possible to measure that distance | in meters (or yards, or whatever). Yes I know about fractal | lengths, coastlines and so on. | | The US yard is exactly 0.9144m such a short decimal | expansion is highly unlikely when selecting two random | units of measurements. It is short because we defined the | modern yard in terms of meters, selecting a short decimal | expansion that was still "close enough" to the old | definition to allow tooling to remain the same. | thechao wrote: | Weird: | | > https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/metric-conversion-act- | of-197... | | > https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/executive-order-12770 | | The US government hasn't been _great_ in converting US industry | to metric. But ... it 's a bit disingenuous to say we didn't | even _try_. | anonporridge wrote: | I believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our | efforts from the 70s. | horsawlarway wrote: | Correct. If you compare the attitudes between Carter and | Reagan - the difference is incredibly stark. | | Say what you will about his impact in office - but I | genuinely believe Carters' loss to Reagan is one of the | defining moments of the country. | | Landslide loss in electoral votes - modest loss of popular | vote. In my opinion - largely because Carter angered his | own party by taking relatively sane and nuanced stances on | complex issues, with a very forward looking attitude. (TLDR | - he was undermining the American Military-Indutrial | complex, which is great for the American people, but bad | for business) | | Regardless of his impact in politics - Carter is one of the | few presidents I find it _very_ hard to not respect, even | if for nothing but his efforts after his presidency. | | Reagan deserves to rot in hell. What a trash pit of a man. | He did basically entire the opposite of Carter - Cut non- | military spending, increased military spending, undermined | the EPA, led directly to the S&L crisis with cuts to | regulation on finance, tried to enforce an anti-abortion | federal law, tried to overturn desegregation laws, started | the war on drugs, on and on and on. | | The man should go down as literally one of the worst things | to ever happen to the US (so far - the same group is | angling to get back into power today in the republican | party). | coliveira wrote: | Raegan was a complete walking disgrace. But the media was | very kind to him, if you don't investigate carefully what | he was doing you'll believe that he was a great | president. The only explanation I see is that he was | fantastic for the war industry and gave everything the | very rich were expecting in terms of fiscal policy. | krallja wrote: | A ronna-Reagan is 10^27 Reagans. | jerf wrote: | One ronna-reagan is approximately 4% of the sun's mass: h | ttps://www.google.com/search?q=%28185+pounds%29+*+10%5E27 | +%... | | At least if I have that right. A single Reagan's mass is | from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ronald- | Reagan-1750.html | | Or, if you prefer, our sun as about 25 ronna-Reagans. | SuoDuanDao wrote: | weird question for anyone with the relevant knowledge, | would 25 ronna-Reagans in one place behave differently | than our sun? I know that mass would be mostly oxygen, | but at that scale does it matter? | nkrisc wrote: | Are you asking in terms of gravitation or as a star? | | By mass, the sun is 71% Hydrogen and 27.1% Helium, the | last 1.9% or so being heavier elements (much of that | being oxygen. | | I'm no expert, but I suspect a mass of 25 ronna-Reagans | would not make a very good star. I imagine it might | collapse into a dense Oxygen and Carbon rich sphere, and | in that environment various chemical reactions might turn | it into some other kind of material. | | But maybe I'm way off. | smueller1234 wrote: | You should ask Randall Munroe! :) | | http://what-if.xkcd.com | jerf wrote: | He did something pretty close early on: https://what- | if.xkcd.com/4/ | | Upping the mass to the sun size would cause some | interesting additional wrinkles because now we're talking | about being large enough to have "problems" with the | pressures in the middle being sufficient to start causing | atoms to squish together, but it would take an astronomer | to be clear on what happens next. My gut and layman's | understanding says you might get a pretty big boom in a | couple hundred thousand years or so, because you'd | basically be building a sun that would be fairly far | along its fuel consumption cycle. | saltcured wrote: | And 1 ronna-mcdonald's is over 9.9e37 served! | [deleted] | rootusrootus wrote: | And the UK, unless for some reason their official speed limits | and such aren't actually, you know, official. | | As a practical matter, we use metric for many things in the US. | The fact that we do not force everyone to change their | customary units to metric really seems to irk some folks, but | mostly outside the US. | NeoTar wrote: | The UK is (still) officially metric, just with a few | exceptions - speed limits being one of them. | Wohlf wrote: | The US is also officially metric: https://en.wikipedia.org/ | wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... | augusto-moura wrote: | There a few exceptions here and there, but the UK uses the | metric system wherever it can, including speed limits in some | locations. | orf wrote: | Where does it use it for speed limits? All our cars have | speedometers in mph. I've never seen a speed limit sign | that uses kmph | shirleyquirk wrote: | I've seen an 8kph limit on inland waterways. But it was | very unusual to see | orf wrote: | Uk is metric, but we do use a mix. Speed limits are still in | mph, and we rarely if ever use kilometres for distances. | Height is in ft and inches, and your own weight is in | stones/pounds. All other weights are in grams and kg, except | for some larger ones (industrial/shipping) which are in | tonnes. Pints are used only for... pints, everything else is | in ml. | | And, the best, is "football pitches" which is often used by | the news to describe large (but not too large) lengths. | [deleted] | MayeulC wrote: | But do you use metric tonnes (1000 kg) and "metric" pints | (1/2 litre, not actually metric, but in use for drinks in | metric countries)? | orf wrote: | Probably metric tonnes, not sure, it's just "a lot" when | it's used colloquially. Pints are imperial for drinks, | 568ml. | nwb99 wrote: | I believe the US legally defines the US customary units by | metric counterparts anyway. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/si- | units-length | | Still, I'm probably the 1% of 1% of Americans who uses Celsius | in daily life, except where I cannot (my car won't let me do | hybrid miles and Celsius, ugh). | Symbiote wrote: | Celsius and miles would be the British localisation for a | car, if that's available. | Aardwolf wrote: | > "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added--a two | followed by 30 zeros. | | But the sun is 2000 quettagrams... looks like we need another | higher prefix | bjt2n3904 wrote: | A question... Why do humans (or at least engineers) work so well | in 1,000? | | I mean. I use milli/micro/nano/pico as an electrical engineer | every day, and it's so intuitive to me. | | But why three orders of magnitude? Why not two orders, or five? | finnh wrote: | I think it's because we can scan it easily. Groups of 4 or more | can confuse the eye: when looking at 5 things, you sometimes | have to take a moment to realize it's 5 not 4 (and, to a lesser | extent, the same is true of 4). | | groups of 3 have first, middle, last - crucially _one_ middle | digit, not 2+, which makes for quick comprehension. | zirkonit wrote: | It's a cultural thing. Chinese (and many more Asian nations) | work so well in 10,000, and sometimes, it feels more natural to | me as well. | aikinai wrote: | The problem with languages that use 10,000 is they still use | commas at 1,000, so you get a very awkward offset that then | requires a mental translation between numeric and verbal | representations. | | Sure if you grow up with it, you have that translation | basically hard-coded but it's still not ideal. | lifthrasiir wrote: | Which is stupid. It is annoyingly frequent that the common | scale in the table is stated as powers of 1,000, not | 10,000, but the scale itself is written verbally (e.g. | "danwi: sibeogweon" _billion wons_ , much like "ten | thousand dollars"). | argentier wrote: | Indians use lakh (100 000 -> 5) and crore (10 000 000 -> 7). | They also group the digits differently. | akavi wrote: | And then combine them into lakh crore (1,00,000,00,00,000 -> | 12) | | Really the worst system of the 3. | Arnavion wrote: | 1 lakh crore is written as 10,00,00,00,00,000. The grouping | is perfectly consistent. | jfoutz wrote: | I think (I'm no expert) 1000 made sense at the time. All of | measurement seems to be more or less made up on the spot, and | everybody agrees to stick with those units. Nice short writeup | of the history of length here[1]. I'm not knocking metric, and | I agree 1000 is nice. From our current understanding of | everything, it all holds together really well. But I think that | was pretty true of all units of measure that lasted any length | of time. | | 1 https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/inches.html | euroderf wrote: | Percentages lack sufficient granularity. Permillages would do | the trick. | frob wrote: | There's even an official per-mille symbol: %0 | | My graduate advisor loved slipping it into papers just to | show it off. I had to dissuade him at least once because it | was in the middle of a table of percentages and who is going | to that the 7th entry out of 12 has %0 instead of %? | euroderf wrote: | Document UI design issue. Don't blame the promillages ! | MayeulC wrote: | Sounds like a missed opportunity to use %0 on all rows. | planede wrote: | Many natural languages have grouping at every three digits in a | decimal number, but it's not universal. | | Like in English 10000 is ten thousand, there is no new single | word for it. | | IMO most of it is momentum and convention, there is nothing | inherently natural about grouping by every 3 digits. | [deleted] | thechao wrote: | I like the fact that it's 10^3. | [deleted] | badrabbit wrote: | I hope there is no mother called Ronna somewhere. Terrible joke. | gerikson wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronna_McDaniel | | She has 2 children according to that article. | Octoth0rpe wrote: | Damn, I was really hoping bronto or hella would get some | traction. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_prefix#Unofficial_prefixe... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella#SI_prefix | foxyv wrote: | > However metric prefixes need to be shortened to just their | first letter--and B and H were already taken, ruling out bronto | and hella. | MayeulC wrote: | Well, you don't have to use a dingle letter either. Deca is | da. | anticensor wrote: | Cyrillic small be (b) and Greek small chi (kh) could have | been used instead. | adastra22 wrote: | There are obvious problems with both those prefixes. | ASalazarMX wrote: | Let's propose nonograms then, seems like anything goes. | krallja wrote: | Could get some cool abbreviations too, like nog and nog. | wlesieutre wrote: | Lessons learned from milli and mega. Oops! | Aardwolf wrote: | No problem there, SI prefixes are case sensitive. But | micro, on the other hand... | aikinai wrote: | Micro is a m, so it's fine too. | celeritascelery wrote: | In practice people seem to use "u" instead | wlesieutre wrote: | So what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given | it a greek letter | leephillips wrote: | Funniest comment I've seen in a while. | euroderf wrote: | DekaDeciFail. | madcaptenor wrote: | how is B taken? | lifthrasiir wrote: | Byte, as per ISO/IEC 80000 (which includes SI in the Part | 1). | mxuribe wrote: | Yeah hella would have been great! | idlewords wrote: | REAL PLANETS HAVE CURVES | drtgh wrote: | Edit: As burkaman said I misspelled units. | burkaman wrote: | 6 ronnagrams, not 6 ronnakilograms. | troelsSteegin wrote: | Via https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03747-9, "Extreme | numbers get new names": | | The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10^27 and 10^30, and | ronto and quecto signify 10^-27 and 10^-30. Earth weighs around | one ronnagram, and an electron's mass is about one quectogram. | | This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when | the organization added zetta (10^21), zepto (10^-21), yotta | (10^24) and yocto (10^-24). | nolok wrote: | > Earth weighs around one ronnagram | | I think this is a error by nature.com, and Earth weighs around | 5.97 ronnagram | singularity2001 wrote: | The character sequence 10^27 is of equal length as 'ronna' and | much cleaner. The only thing left was a smart short way to | speak it without losing the semantics. | | How about 10^17 == "tenset", 10^27 == "venset", ... | | Inspired by French vingt, from Old French vint, from Latin | viginti. | | Since the length of words (should) correspond to the frequency | of usage, longer variants would be ok if not preferable too: | | 10^... == tento... | | 10^16 == tento-seize ... | zokier wrote: | 16 and 17 are not divisible by 3 | rockostrich wrote: | Is there a convention for prefixes for 10^n where abs(n) > | 3 and n % 3 != 0? It seems strange to me that we would have | prefixes for 10^+/-1 and 10^+/-2 but not for any larger | values. | zokier wrote: | Even the old deci/deca/hecto/centi prefixes are largely | avoided, especially in science/engineering. | WastingMyTime89 wrote: | Are you American by chance? Because I can assure you that | centimetres are everywhere here and both hectolitres and | centilitres are fairly common, not to talk about decibel. | idiotsecant wrote: | It's not so strange - a lot of our natural experience of | the universe is within 3 orders of magnitude of the base | units we use. Those are very commonly referenced and as | such have common prefixes. | chrisshroba wrote: | Agreed, I can think of lots of use cases that come up in | day to day life: | | - decade | | - century | | - decagon | | - centimeter | | - decimal system | | - decathlon | | - centipede | | edit: admittedly, hecto is pretty rare and centi is often | used for both 1/100 and 100 | idiotsecant wrote: | ah yes, the centipede. Famously the unit of measure of | one hundred pedes. | toast0 wrote: | India commonly uses Lakh for 10^5 1,00,000 and Crore for | 10^7 1,00,00,000. After that, there's Arab at 10^9, | Kharab at 10^11, Neel at 10^13, and Padma 10^15, but as a | US person, I've never seen those used, although I've seen | Lakh and Crore. Sometimes lakh crore shows up, which is | 10^12 or a (short) trillion, but sometimes trillion is | used for that in documents otherwise using lakhs and | crores and not billions or millions. | Arnavion wrote: | (I'm Indian.) Yes, India groups the first three digits | and then subsequent groups are two digits, eg | 12,34,56,789. So instead of hundred thousand it's lakh, | and instead of hundred lakhs it's crore. We never learned | any numbers above crore in school. I remember hearing | about arab from other kids but never saw it used, and I | never heard about the others you mentioned. | _Algernon_ wrote: | 10^3 is the same length as "kilo". | | 10^6 is the same length as "mega". | | 10^9 is the same length as "giga". | | Why is length suddenly an argument against new prefixes? | skykooler wrote: | An electron's mass is about a rontogram, not a quectogram. | | (A bit confusing since most sources list electron mass as | 9x10^-31 kilograms, rather than 9x10^-28 grams.) | veltas wrote: | Just now learning why it's called Yocto Linux. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-18 23:00 UTC)