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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

#201

Post by Asraelite »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #200

Can someone ELI5 how you “weigh” the earth? Isn’t weight based off gravity? And gravity is relative to the mass of the object you are on, for example we say you would weigh less on the moon and more on Jupiter. So how exactly to you weigh a planet, and why would that even be useful? Do you assume some theoretical force and hypothetically place the earth on a scale and apply that force? When talking about planets isn’…

It's pretty simple: colloquially "weight" is a synonym for mass. That's how it's being used here.

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

#203

Post by Asraelite »

illys wrote: post #99

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…

Does anyone know why they chose "ronna" instead of "renna"? It should be r + ennea (Greek for nine), so where does the "o" come from?

Every prefix up until now has been consistent about the first vowel mirroring the Greek word:

  tetra -> tera
  penta -> peta
  hex -> exa
  hepta -> zetta
  okto -> yotta

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

#204

Post by eesmith »

gerikson wrote: post #8
_8j50 wrote: post #2

I hope there is no mother called Ronna somewhere. Terrible joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronna_McDaniel She has 2 children according to that article.

And her mother, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronna_Romney .

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

#205

Post by wlesieutre »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #182
thaumasiotes wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(For completeness, aspiration is not strictly restricted to the beginning of a word in classical-to-Byzantine Greek. It might be represented in one of three ways: - 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/, o…

Thanks for this, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything about Greek today!

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

#206

Post by InitialLastName »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #141
zokier wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the old deci/deca/hecto/centi prefixes are largely avoided, especially in science/engineering.

Are you American by chance? Because I can assure you that centimetres are everywhere here and both hectolitres and centilitres are fairly common, not to talk about decibel.

decibel is a bit of a special case, as that is essentially the only form anyone uses (I operate in a world that is decibel-heavy and I can't remember ever having seen a bel in the wild).

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

#207

Post by InitialLastName »

bruce511 wrote: post #187
GuB-42 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ares is 100 Square metres. Not to be confused with acres, which is around 4047 Square metres. 2471 acres per hectare.

So you're saying there are roughly 2.5 hectacres per hectare.

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

#208

Post by programmer_dude »

anonporridge wrote: post #40
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.”

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.

This is meaningless. Everything is metric and nonmetric at the same time by this definition since you can always find a linear equation which let's you convert between the systems.

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

#210

Post by yellowapple »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #156
wlesieutre wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So just put a diacritic over the unit symbol; problem solved.
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