Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

phys.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 215 posts

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

#151

Post by silisili »

allanrbo wrote: post #116
gregmac wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's kinda funny that you mention it. If we say to someone '99 hundred', they'd immediately understand it as 9,900. If we say 'hundred hundred', it's an immediate math problem trying to figure out how many zeros and what it's called. At least, that's how I'd react.

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

#152

Post by titzer »

iquerno wrote: post #124
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…

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…

$MEGACORP measures internal disk storage capacity in exabytes.

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

#153

Post by anonporridge »

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…

No. It's true because 1 inch is explicitly defined by the governing body as 2.54 cm, whereas one meter is defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre

The units of the metric system are defined by physical properties that appear to be constant throughout the universe.

The units of the US customary system are defined as some exact number of equivalent metric units.

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

#154

Post by naniwaduni »

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……

"10^27" is longer than "ronna" measured by character width, by keystrokes, or by finger travel. It's also significantly longer than "R".

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

#155

Post by BillinghamJ »

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…

I've found that it's becoming increasingly common to use metric for height and weight also - particularly with younger people etc.

I think we'll soon be left with the only remaining imperial bits being speed, long distances, and pints of beer - none of which seem likely to go away any time soon

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

#156

Post by thaumasiotes »

wlesieutre wrote: post #64
aikinai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Micro is a μ, so it’s fine too.

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.

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

#157

Post by thaumasiotes »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #110
madcaptenor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is B taken?

Byte, as per ISO/IEC 80000 (which includes SI in the Part 1).

Byte's not a prefix. Is it a problem for anyone when millimeters are written "mm"?

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

#158

Post by thaumasiotes »

Arnavion wrote: post #114
akavi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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

#159

Post by robomartin »

> the Earth weighs approximately six ronnagrams

This is from a Physics forum? Really?

No! The Earth does not have weight! It has mass. Weight is a force. It is a function of gravitational pull between two masses.

If you want to talk about force you have to use Newtown's Law of Universal Gravitation:

  F = (G * m1 * m2) / r**2
You could speak in terms of gravitational pull between the earth and the moon or any other object in space, and that's about it.

I can't see how the concept of weight makes any sense when it comes to a planet. At all. Think of a hypothetical object in the middle of space with nothing whatsoever around it for millions of light years. No weight. Mass, of course.

You can't just use earth's 9.8 m/s*2 to convert from Kg to Newtons...that makes no sense at all in the frame of reference of any planet, even earth.

This isn't pedantic at all. Try to take a physic test anywhere and confuse these concepts, units of mass and force and see how well you do.

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

#160

Post by lifthrasiir »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #157
lifthrasiir wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Byte, as per ISO/IEC 80000 (which includes SI in the Part 1).

Byte's not a prefix. Is it a problem for anyone when millimeters are written "mm"?

I don't know. Maybe new metric prefixes are subject to tighter requirements, while older prefixes like milli- are here to stay.
Post reply on HN