[HN Gopher] Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes...
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Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
Author : leephillips
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-11-18 14:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| mesozoic wrote:
| weight or mass? Weight doesn't make any sense
| 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.
| COGlory wrote:
| When I count viruses, I usually just say "ten to the ninth"
| instead of giga tbh.
| 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
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| How is "Ronna" pronounced... "Row Nah" or "Ron Ah"? I assume it's
| like "donna", but if I don't ask I'm going to say it wrong for
| sure.
| Asraelite wrote:
| "Ron Ah"
| zardo wrote:
| Now that we have 10, will the next set just repeat? E.g.
| kiloquettagrams, megaquettameters
| _kst_ wrote:
| So we have "ronna" or "R" for 10^27 and "quetta" or "Q" for
| 10^30.
|
| I haven't seen the official binary equivalents.
|
| For example, we have "yotta" or "Y" for 10^24, and "yobi" or "Yi"
| for 2^80.
|
| Are we going have "robi" and "quebi"? I presume the abbreviations
| will be "Ri" and "Qi".
|
| (I guess we don't need fractional binary prefixes. There's not
| much use for nanobytes.)
|
| Of course since this was just announced today, I'm not really
| complaining.
| 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)
| saalweachter wrote:
| The gram is the easiest to save by working backwards from
| Avogadro's number.
|
| Avogadro's number is close to 24!, so we could redefine our
| mass unit as exactly 24! hydrogen atoms (or 4!!) and that
| comes out to within about 3% of a gram while being
| significantly easier to communicate to an extraterrestrial
| civilization.
| SJSque wrote:
| 10E6 = 10x106 = 107, so you can unpick that nit!
| Someone wrote:
| Yep!
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Picking 1/10^9 would also have had the advantage of making
| the distance from the pole to the equator ~1
| gigacentimeter.
|
| Exploring a bit, picking 4 times that, as an estimate of
| the _circumference_ , would give us a basic length unit of
| 4 cm (a pretty reasonable unit--bit over an inch and a
| half, fits right in with the variety of Chinese cun
| standards, for example). Then our immediate volume unit is
| 64 mL, which seems kind of small (on the scale of 2
| floces), but ten of them make a decent "pint", so I think
| it can work--it's ~13% bigger than an imperial pint instead
| of ~12% smaller. the corresponding mass unit, at ~64 g,
| which again seems a bit small but manages to line up an
| average person's weight right around 1 kilo.
| 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...
| count wrote:
| Data xfer'd vs. data stored.
| ordu wrote:
| The strange thing is the symmetry. Why these prefixes cover
| multipliers from 10^-30 to 10^30? Why not 10^-20 to 10^40? Where
| the symmetry comes from?
|
| Is it just people think that symmetry is a good thing, and for
| example they added 10^-30 despite the lack of demand? Or there is
| some deeper reason? Or it is more like one of those coincidences?
| rg2004 wrote:
| Dandy. A memento of the corona virus
| arunc wrote:
| And here in US, we are stuck with imperial units like it was
| 1800s: oz, pounds, inches, feet, miles, etc for all common usage.
| When a foreigner visits here, the first thing they realize is how
| US has truly siloed itself from the rest of the world.
| 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.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 how you "weigh" the earth? Isn't weight based
| off gravity? And gravity is relative to the mass of the object
| you are on, for example we say you would weigh less on the moon
| and more on Jupiter. So how exactly to you weigh a planet, and
| why would that even be useful? Do you assume some theoretical
| force and hypothetically place the earth on a scale and apply
| that force? When talking about planets isn't mass a better way to
| measure and classify rather than weight?
| Asraelite wrote:
| It's pretty simple: colloquially "weight" is a synonym for
| mass. That's how it's being used here.
| 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.
| labster wrote:
| Uppercase MB is megabytes, lowercase mb is millibars. Both can
| go through a series of tubes, but millibars are also useful in
| dump trucks, to make the wheels go round and round.
| Asraelite wrote:
| Does anyone know why they chose "ronna" instead of "renna"? It
| should be r + ennea (Greek for nine), so where does the "o"
| come from?
|
| Every prefix up until now has been consistent about the first
| vowel mirroring the Greek word: tetra -> tera
| penta -> peta hex -> exa hepta -> zetta okto
| -> yotta
| 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
| titzer wrote:
| $MEGACORP measures internal disk storage capacity in
| exabytes.
| 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.
| silisili wrote:
| It's kinda funny that you mention it. If we say to someone
| '99 hundred', they'd immediately understand it as 9,900. If
| we say 'hundred hundred', it's an immediate math problem
| trying to figure out how many zeros and what it's called.
| At least, that's how I'd react.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| > If we say to someone '99 hundred', they'd immediately
| understand it as 9,900.
|
| That's definitely untrue. In my native language we never
| mix tens and hundreds, and it always takes me a moment to
| parse that "thirteen hundred" means one thousand and
| three hundred.
| silisili wrote:
| Ah, I should have specified in the US. It's more common
| to say numbers between 100 and 10k as hundreds, unless
| it's exactly on a thousand. I think most people would say
| nineteen hundred, or 21 hundred for 1900 and 2100, but
| nobody would say 20 hundred for 2000(except for military
| time).
| halper wrote:
| SI prefixes could originally be combined like that: it was
| perfectly fine to say one hectokilometre. Such usage is now
| deprecated, though. You'd have to say 0.1 megametre instead.
| 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:
| 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]
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This seems offtopic and flame war bait, especially posted
| without additional commentary.
| 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.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| If only some governing body had been aggressive enough to
| redefine NTSC 60Hz as actually 60 fps.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It was 60fps. Color required an adjustment to prevent
| stationary artifacts.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Right, but they should've put in the work to redo things
| back then so we wouldn't have to deal with stupid refresh
| rates now lol
| 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.
| anonporridge wrote:
| No. It's true because 1 inch is explicitly _defined_ by the
| governing body as 2.54 cm, whereas one meter is _defined_
| as "the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum
| in 1/299792458 of a second".
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
|
| The units of the metric system are defined by physical
| properties that appear to be constant throughout the
| universe.
|
| The units of the US customary system are defined as some
| exact number of equivalent metric units.
| 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:
| 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:
| Oh right, yeah. In canals it's kmph.
| 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.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| My favourite bit of nonsense is signs for distance for
| walkers. Distances are usually in miles or fractions of
| miles but for indicating things really close by (e.g.
| toilets round the corner) we switch to metres.
| [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)?
| nicoburns wrote:
| We use metric tonnes.
|
| For pints (only really used for beer and milk), we still
| use an imperial pint but it's officially specified in
| millilitres (568ml) and this will always be printed on
| packaging.
| orf wrote:
| Probably metric tonnes, not sure, it's just "a lot" when
| it's used colloquially. Pints are imperial for drinks,
| 568ml.
| BillinghamJ wrote:
| I've found that it's becoming increasingly common to use
| metric for height and weight also - particularly with
| younger people etc.
|
| I think we'll soon be left with the only remaining imperial
| bits being speed, long distances, and pints of beer - none
| of which seem likely to go away any time soon
| 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
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Exactly 1 Solar mass.
| geenew wrote:
| Need an epoch on that
| 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.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Is it? If 1 lakh is 1,00,000 and 1 crore is 1,00,00,000,
| wouldn't the consistent grouping for 1 lakh crore be
| 1,00,000,00,00,000? How do you get to 10,00,00,00,00,000
| by applying the same rules that apply to lakh and crore?
| Arnavion wrote:
| The consistency is "three digits in the first group and
| two in all others".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| But now the written form of the number is completely
| disconnected from the spoken form. That means you have to
| write out the whole number first, and then go back
| through and add separators in random locations.
|
| It's a rule that will tell you how to write "any number"
| equally, but it makes all the numbers inconsistent with
| each other.
| 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.
| halper wrote:
| Blood-alcohol levels are typically measured as permilles in
| some countries, like Sweden. 0.2 %0 is the legal limit there.
| Also used in some countries in Europe to denote the grade of
| slopes (as in warning for steep hills).
|
| Never seen permyriads, though.
| 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.
| pezezin wrote:
| Technically there is a word for 10 000: "myriad". But nobody
| uses it like that anymore...
| halper wrote:
| I've been guilty of using not only permille but also
| permyriad (%00) in certain work where it made sense ...
| [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.
| eesmith wrote:
| And her mother, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronna_Romney .
| 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.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| m is avoided in medicine for being difficult to represent
| in writing and in computer systems. It's also a source of
| confusion and error.
|
| https://www.ismp.org/recommendations/error-prone-
| abbreviatio...
|
| > Error-Prone Abbreviations, Symbols, and Dose
| Designations:
|
| > ug
|
| > _Intended Meaning_ : Microgram _Misinterpretation_ :
| Mistaken as mg _Best Practice_ : Use mcg
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Not while using the standard Greek alphabet. There is no
| letter for the sound /h/; it is represented as a
| diacritic mark applied to the first letter of a word.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| (For completeness, aspiration is not strictly restricted
| to the beginning of a word in classical-to-Byzantine
| Greek. It might be represented in one of three ways:
|
| - At the beginning of a word, according to Byzantine
| convention, it is represented by an aspiration mark,
| discussed above. This can only occur if the word begins
| with a vowel, or with R. ( _All_ words beginning with R
| are aspirated.)
|
| - Following a /p/, /t/, or /k/ sound, aspiration is
| represented by mutating the letter into an aspirated
| form. Unaspirated p becomes aspirated ph, t becomes th, k
| becomes kh. By the time we're talking about Byzantine
| Greek, the "aspirated" letters have mostly mutated into
| other sounds. But for ancient Ancient Greek, they are
| aspirated forms.
|
| - Doubled Rs have something special going on with them,
| and the Byzantines use a diacritic mark on the second R
| even though, obviously, it cannot occur at the beginning
| of a word. Again there is no contrast between "aspirated"
| and "unaspirated" double R; the aspiration is mandatory.
|
| As you move into _earlier_ stages of Greek, you lose the
| standardization of the alphabet; there are plenty of
| Greek inscriptions where the sound is represented by the
| glyph H.)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Thanks for this, I wasn't expecting to learn anything
| about Greek today!
| schoen wrote:
| Maybe we could have called it e, like 10 eb = 10
| hellabits.
| 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).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Byte's not a prefix. Is it a problem for anyone when
| millimeters are written "mm"?
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| I don't know. Maybe _new_ metric prefixes are subject to
| tighter requirements, while older prefixes like milli-
| are here to stay.
| brewmarche wrote:
| Units can be multiplied though. If N were a prefix you
| couldn't distinguish Newtonmetres from N many metres
|
| I think older prefixes are just grandfathered in
| mxuribe wrote:
| Yeah hella would have been great!
| robomartin wrote:
| > the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams
|
| This is from a Physics forum? Really?
|
| No! The Earth does not have weight! It has mass. Weight is a
| force. It is a function of gravitational pull between two masses.
|
| If you want to talk about force you have to use Newtown's Law of
| Universal Gravitation: F = (G * m1 * m2) / r**2
|
| You could speak in terms of gravitational pull between the earth
| and the moon or any other object in space, and that's about it.
|
| I can't see how the concept of weight makes any sense when it
| comes to a planet. At all. Think of a hypothetical object in the
| middle of space with nothing whatsoever around it for millions of
| light years. No weight. Mass, of course.
|
| You can't just use earth's 9.8 m/s*2 to convert from Kg to
| Newtons...that makes no sense at all in the frame of reference of
| any planet, even earth.
|
| This isn't pedantic at all. Try to take a physic test anywhere
| and confuse these concepts, units of mass and force and see how
| well you do.
| adrian_b wrote:
| It is very important to distinguish the 2 physical quantities
| whose standard names are now "force" and "mass", but it is
| debatable whether it was good choice to arbitrarily assign to
| the word "weight" the meaning of a force and to establish the
| new word "mass" (new with this meaning) for what is now called
| "mass".
|
| The word "weight" and its equivalents in other European
| languages, e.g. "poids", "pondo" etc., have been used for
| thousands of years principally to name the quantities measured
| by weighing with a balance, which are masses, not forces, and
| only seldom and mostly metaphorically and non-quantitatively to
| refer to a force. By etymology, such words derive in one way or
| another from the operation of using a weighing balance, e.g.
| "pound" means "hanging", from hanging objects on the weighing
| scales.
|
| The word "mass" has been used for thousands of years only with
| a meaning that had nothing to do with a measurable quantity,
| but only to name some amorphous piece of some material, such as
| dough, clay, soil, rubble.
|
| A wiser choice would have been to name as "weight" what is now
| named "mass" and to use a name such as "force of gravity" for
| what is now named "weight".
|
| Such a terminology would have kept the continuity with the
| traditional meanings of the words and would not have offered
| opportunities for the majority of the people, who even today
| continue to use those traditional meanings in colloquial
| language, to be corrected by those who have made an arbitrary
| choice to assign new meanings to old words.
|
| Unfortunately there exists a very large number of scientific or
| technical terms whose meaning has been changed some time during
| the last few centuries, sometimes intentionally, due to
| questionable decisions, but in many times due to various errors
| or misunderstandings.
|
| Even when such names reflect very serious errors of those who
| have coined them, their meaning can no longer be changed, as
| too much new literature has accumulated, which uses the new
| meanings.
| 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
| Jedd wrote:
| I think it's possible both statements are incorrect.
|
| The earth's _mass_ may well be 5.97 ronnagrams.
|
| The _weight_ of the earth would be measured in newtons, yes?
| 01acheru wrote:
| Weight in relation to what? The Earth sits in the void of
| space, it is like a free falling apple.
| bfung wrote:
| Agree with Earth's "weight", disappointed a physics
| website would make such a silly error!
|
| > void of space, it is like a free falling apple
|
| falling where in space??? =p ;)
| 01acheru wrote:
| Everything is relative :)
| k_sze wrote:
| I believe you are correct. Within the gravitational field
| around it, the whole Earth is in free fall and has no
| weight.
|
| The Earth has a _mass_ , however.
| 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 ...
| naniwaduni wrote:
| "10^27" is longer than "ronna" measured by character width,
| by keystrokes, or by finger travel. It's also significantly
| longer than "R".
| 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| decibel is a bit of a special case, as that is
| essentially the only form anyone uses (I operate in a
| world that is decibel-heavy and I can't remember ever
| having seen a bel in the wild).
| nicwilson wrote:
| they do come up though, e.g. blood (dL)
| 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.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| well... yes?
|
| > Centipedes (from New Latin centi-, "hundred", and Latin
| pes, pedis, "foot")
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The hectopascal is the most common unit for atmospheric
| pressure. It replaced the equivalent millibar to match SI
| units. Standard atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013
| hPa.
|
| Hectolitres are commonly used in the food and drink
| industry. For example wineries and breweries typically
| measure their production in hectolitres.
|
| Not exactly hecto but land, especially farm land is often
| measured in hectares. It is a non-SI metric unit
| equivalent to the square hectometer or 10000 square
| meters. We most likely kept the name because "hectare"
| sounds better than "square hectometer". As expected, 1
| hectare is worth 100 ares, but ares and its other
| multiples are much less used than hectares.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Ares is 100 Square metres. Not to be confused with acres,
| which is around 4047 Square metres.
|
| 2471 acres per hectare.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| So you're saying there are roughly 2.5 hectacres per
| hectare.
| runarberg wrote:
| > a lot of our natural experience of the universe is
| within 3 orders of magnitude of the base units we use.
|
| That may be in large part because of the unit prefixes we
| use. That is we think of these things in 3 orders of
| magnitudes because our unit prefixes come in three orders
| of magnitude but not the other way around. I think a much
| likelier explanation is the fact that many European
| languages (most importantly French and English) stop
| naming each decimal order after a thousand. If there was
| a word for ten-thousand--say _fiorthom_ --but not a
| hundred-thousand (ten-fiorthom), surely these prefixes
| would map be multiples of 104 as well.
| 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.
| rippercushions wrote:
| In Japan and China you use groups of 10,000, so there's
| Mo (1e4), the largest bill (10,000 yen); Yi (1e8, 100
| million), the approximate population of Japan and a
| convenient unit for housing prices in yen; and Zhao
| (1e12, 1 trillion), which is used for eg really expensive
| infra projects like new bullet trains.
|
| On paper, there are much larger units too, but they are
| never used.
| 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.
| alex028502 wrote:
| It's a shame they didn't want to go one more 00, because
| that nicely lines up with a billion
|
| ... Or milliard, or giga
| c3534l wrote:
| No one is ever going to say, or remember, "a ten to the
| twenty seven byte of data."
| _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.
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