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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
> However metric prefixes need to be shortened to just their first letter—and B and H were already taken, ruling out bronto and hella.
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.”
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But the sun is 2000 quettagrams... looks like we need another higher prefix
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
"(...) 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.