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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

#131

Post by rjbwork »

saltcured wrote: post #129
iquerno wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ea…

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…

>200k USD salaries instead of 2e5 USD?

You mean 2 lakh USD?

:D

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

orf wrote: post #122
rootusrootus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 n…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

kibwen wrote: post #92
anonporridge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specifically, this happened in 1893: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

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.

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

#134

Post by aidenn0 »

unwind wrote: post #121
anonporridge wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

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

#135

Post by idiotsecant »

chrisshroba wrote: post #118
idiotsecant wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

ah yes, the centipede. Famously the unit of measure of one hundred pedes.

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

#136

Post by MayeulC »

orf wrote: post #122
rootusrootus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 n…

But do you use metric tonnes (1000 kg) and "metric" pints (½ litre, not actually metric, but in use for drinks in metric countries)?

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

#137

Post by tmtvl »

standardUser wrote: post #90
wolfi1 wrote: post #44

I'm disappointed that hella has not become a prefix

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.

You'd be surprised how many erstwhile lame puns our daily conversation includes. Ever use the term "nothing"?

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

#138

Post by orf »

MayeulC wrote: post #136
orf wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

But do you use metric tonnes (1000 kg) and "metric" pints (½ litre, not actually metric, but in use for drinks in metric countries)?

Probably metric tonnes, not sure, it’s just “a lot” when it’s used colloquially. Pints are imperial for drinks, 568ml.

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

#139

Post by orf »

augusto-moura wrote: post #119
rootusrootus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There a few exceptions here and there, but the UK uses the metric system wherever it can, including speed limits in some locations.

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

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

#140

Post by _Algernon_ »

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……

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?

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