161–170 of 215 posts
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.”
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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)?
For pints (only really used for beer and milk), we still use an imperial pint but it's officially specified in millilitres (568ml) and this will always be printed on packaging.
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 (…
> Earth weighs around one ronnagram I think this is a error by nature.com, and Earth weighs around 5.97 ronnagram
The earth's mass may well be 5.97 ronnagrams.
The weight of the earth would be measured in newtons, yes?
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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.
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.
That may be in large part because of the unit prefixes we use. That is we think of these things in 3 orders of magnitudes because our unit prefixes come in three orders of magnitude but not the other way around. I think a much likelier explanation is the fact that many European languages (most importantly French and English) stop naming each decimal order after a thousand. If there was a word for ten-thousand—say fiorthom—but not a hundred-thousand (ten-fiorthom), surely these prefixes would map be multiples of 10⁴ as well.
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> Earth weighs around one ronnagram I think this is a error by nature.com, and Earth weighs around 5.97 ronnagram
I think it's possible both statements are incorrect. The earth's mass may well be 5.97 ronnagrams. The weight of the earth would be measured in newtons, yes?
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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…
Exploring a bit, picking 4 times that, as an estimate of the circumference, would give us a basic length unit of 4 cm (a pretty reasonable unit—bit over an inch and a half, fits right in with the variety of Chinese cun standards, for example). Then our immediate volume unit is 64 mL, which seems kind of small (on the scale of 2 floces), but ten of them make a decent "pint", so I think it can work—it's ~13% bigger than an imperial pint instead of ~12% smaller. the corresponding mass unit, at ~64 g, which again seems a bit small but manages to line up an average person's weight right around 1 kilo.
I haven't seen the official binary equivalents.
For example, we have "yotta" or "Y" for 10^24, and "yobi" or "Yi" for 2^80.
Are we going have "robi" and "quebi"? I presume the abbreviations will be "Ri" and "Qi".
(I guess we don't need fractional binary prefixes. There's not much use for nanobytes.)
Of course since this was just announced today, I'm not really complaining.
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.
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1 lakh crore is written as 10,00,00,00,00,000. The grouping is perfectly consistent.
Is it? If 1 lakh is 1,00,000 and 1 crore is 1,00,00,000, wouldn't the consistent grouping for 1 lakh crore be 1,00,000,00,00,000? How do you get to 10,00,00,00,00,000 by applying the same rules that apply to lakh and crore?