Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 215 posts

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

#81

Post by Symbiote »

nwb99 wrote: post #42
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.”

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).

Celsius and miles would be the British localisation for a car, if that's available.

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

#82

Post by smueller1234 »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #71
jerf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

You should ask Randall Munroe! :)

http://what-if.xkcd.com

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

#83

Post by skykooler »

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 (…

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.)

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

#86

Post by rockostrich »

zokier wrote: post #69
singularity2001 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#87

Post by texaslonghorn5 »

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.

petawatt laser

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

#88

Post by xboxnolifes »

burkaman wrote: post #77
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.

> 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.

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".

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

#89

Post by IvyMike »

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.
Post reply on HN