181–190 of 215 posts
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So what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given it a greek letter
Not while using the standard Greek alphabet. There is no letter for the sound /h/; it is represented as a diacritic mark applied to the first letter of a word.
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So what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given it a greek letter
Not while using the standard Greek alphabet. There is no letter for the sound /h/; it is represented as a diacritic mark applied to the first letter of a word.
- At the beginning of a word, according to Byzantine convention, it is represented by an aspiration mark, discussed above. This can only occur if the word begins with a vowel, or with R. (All words beginning with R are aspirated.)
- Following a /p/, /t/, or /k/ sound, aspiration is represented by mutating the letter into an aspirated form. Unaspirated π becomes aspirated φ, τ becomes θ, κ becomes χ. By the time we're talking about Byzantine Greek, the "aspirated" letters have mostly mutated into other sounds. But for ancient Ancient Greek, they are aspirated forms.
- Doubled Rs have something special going on with them, and the Byzantines use a diacritic mark on the second R even though, obviously, it cannot occur at the beginning of a word. Again there is no contrast between "aspirated" and "unaspirated" double R; the aspiration is mandatory.
As you move into earlier stages of Greek, you lose the standardization of the alphabet; there are plenty of Greek inscriptions where the sound is represented by the glyph H.)
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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.
If only some governing body had been aggressive enough to redefine NTSC 60Hz as actually 60 fps.
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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?
Weight in relation to what? The Earth sits in the void of space, it is like a free falling apple.
The Earth has a mass, however.
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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?
The consistency is "three digits in the first group and two in all others".
It's a rule that will tell you how to write "any number" equally, but it makes all the numbers inconsistent with each other.
Pretty nice table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix "(...) 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 scientif…
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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
The hectopascal is the most common unit for atmospheric pressure. It replaced the equivalent millibar to match SI units. Standard atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013 hPa. Hectolitres are commonly used in the food and drink industry. For example wineries and breweries typically measure their production in hectolitres. Not exactly hecto but land, especially farm land is often measured in hectares. It is a non-SI…
2471 acres per hectare.
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.
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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?
Weight in relation to what? The Earth sits in the void of space, it is like a free falling apple.
> void of space, it is like a free falling apple
falling where in space??? =p ;)
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India commonly uses Lakh for 10^5 1,00,000 and Crore for 10^7 1,00,00,000. After that, there's Arab at 10^9, Kharab at 10^11, Neel at 10^13, and Padma 10^15, but as a US person, I've never seen those used, although I've seen Lakh and Crore. Sometimes lakh crore shows up, which is 10^12 or a (short) trillion, but sometimes trillion is used for that in documents otherwise using lakhs and crores and not billions or mill…
(I'm Indian.) Yes, India groups the first three digits and then subsequent groups are two digits, eg 12,34,56,789. So instead of hundred thousand it's lakh, and instead of hundred lakhs it's crore. We never learned any numbers above crore in school. I remember hearing about arab from other kids but never saw it used, and I never heard about the others you mentioned.
... Or milliard, or giga