Having this out of the way, it's time to address the short scale versus long scale issue. (ducks) ;-)
Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
111–120 of 215 posts
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a cultural thing. Chinese (and many more Asian nations) work so well in 10,000, and sometimes, it feels more natural to me as well.
The problem with languages that use 10,000 is they still use commas at 1,000, so you get a very awkward offset that then requires a mental translation between numeric and verbal representations. Sure if you grow up with it, you have that translation basically hard-coded but it’s still not ideal.
Which is stupid. It is annoyingly frequent that the common scale in the table is stated as powers of 1,000, not 10,000, but the scale itself is written verbally (e.g. "단위: 십억원" billion wons, much like "ten thousand dollars").
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indians use lakh (100 000 -> 5) and crore (10 000 000 -> 7). They also group the digits differently.
And then combine them into lakh crore (1,00,000,00,00,000 -> 12) Really the worst system of the 3.
1 lakh crore is written as 10,00,00,00,00,000. The grouping is perfectly consistent.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#115From 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.”
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.
The UK is (still) officially metric, just with a few exceptions - speed limits being one of them.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#116Pretty 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…
Do we need to have a single letter? Is it acceptable to combine prefixes? Eg: 1 QB (quettabyte) == 1,000,000 YB (yottabytes) == 1 MYB (mega-yottabyte) Without the new prefixes, we could have gone to 1 YYB (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10^48 bytes)
That is almost like reinventing something like Roman numerals :-) Maybe better to stick with 1e48 notation after all.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#117Having this out of the way, it's time to address the short scale versus long scale issue. (ducks) ;-)
That’s been addressed. In English you use the short scale. Other languages use whichever scale they want.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#119From 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.”
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.
Re: Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
#120From 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.”
Except the US uses the Metric system
> U.S. customary units have been defined in terms of metric units since the 19th century, and the SI has been the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" since 1975 according to United States law.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...