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Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

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Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#51

Post by frob »

euroderf wrote: post #39
bjt2n3904 wrote: post #13

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?

Percentages lack sufficient granularity. Permillages would do the trick.

There's even an official per-mille symbol: ‰

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 ‰ instead of %?

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#52

Post by Someone »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #45
rikkipitt wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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)

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#53

Post by singularity2001 »

troelsSteegin wrote: post #49

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 (…

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 vīgintī.

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 …

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#54

Post by krallja »

anonporridge wrote: post #43
thechao wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our efforts from the 70s.

A ronna-Reagan is 10^27 Reagans.

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#55

Post by krallja »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #29
anticensor wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyrillic small be (б) and Greek small chi (χ) could have been used instead.

Let's propose ñoñograms then, seems like anything goes.

Could get some cool abbreviations too, like のg and 노g.

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#56

Post by GordonS »

Normille wrote: post #35
NKosmatos wrote: post #25

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.”

Quoted post unavailable.

> eleventy-billion-squillion-sixty-fourths of an inch

Or, for short, the Freedom Inch!

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#57

Post by horsawlarway »

anonporridge wrote: post #43
thechao wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our efforts from the 70s.

[flagged]

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#58

Post by traxys »

rnhmjoj wrote: post #34

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.

In High Performance Computing the most recent Top1 machine ils counted in Exaflops, so there's quite some talk aubout exascale computing.

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#59

Post by jerf »

krallja wrote: post #54
anonporridge wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our efforts from the 70s.

A ronna-Reagan is 10^27 Reagans.

One ronna-reagan is approximately 4% of the sun's mass: https://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.

Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

#60

Post by divbzero »

opwieurposiu wrote: post #45
rikkipitt wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

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