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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

#61

Post by SJSque »

Someone wrote: post #52
opwieurposiu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_... ) rea…

10E6 = 10×10⁶ = 10⁷, so you can unpick that nit!

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

#62

Post by Normille »

divbzero wrote: post #60
opwieurposiu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

  >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

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

#63

Post by kyawzazaw »

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.”

We use the Metric System quite frequently in Myanmar.

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

#64

Post by wlesieutre »

aikinai wrote: post #18
Aardwolf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem there, SI prefixes are case sensitive. But micro, on the other hand...

Micro is a μ, so it’s fine too.

So what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given it a greek letter

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

#66

Post by Someone »

SJSque wrote: post #61
Someone wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_... ) rea…

10E6 = 10×10⁶ = 10⁷, so you can unpick that nit!

Yep!

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

#67

Post by jl6 »

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...

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

#68

Post by planede »

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?

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.

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

#69

Post by zokier »

singularity2001 wrote: post #53
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……

16 and 17 are not divisible by 3
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