191–200 of 215 posts
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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 think older prefixes are just grandfathered in
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Weight in relation to what? The Earth sits in the void of space, it is like a free falling apple.
Agree with Earth’s “weight”, disappointed a physics website would make such a silly error! > void of space, it is like a free falling apple falling where in space??? =p ;)
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If only some governing body had been aggressive enough to redefine NTSC 60Hz as actually 60 fps.
It was 60fps. Color required an adjustment to prevent stationary artifacts.
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…
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)
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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.
Technically there is a word for 10 000: "myriad". But nobody uses it like that anymore...
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?
Percentages lack sufficient granularity. Permillages would do the trick.
Never seen permyriads, though.
So RB and QB for ronnabyte and quettabyte? What system could be described at that scale? Does Google store quettabytes of data? Considering Seagate is shipping only 155EB (=0.000000000155QB) of storage per quarter[0], reaching the QB scale seems a way off. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2022/08/21/c2q-2022...
> 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 obj…
The word "weight" and its equivalents in other European languages, e.g. "poids", "pondo" etc., have been used for thousands of years principally to name the quantities measured by weighing with a balance, which are masses, not forces, and only seldom and mostly metaphorically and non-quantitatively to refer to a force. By etymology, such words derive in one way or another from the operation of using a weighing balance, e.g. "pound" means "hanging", from hanging objects on the weighing scales.
The word "mass" has been used for thousands of years only with a meaning that had nothing to do with a measurable quantity, but only to name some amorphous piece of some material, such as dough, clay, soil, rubble.
A wiser choice would have been to name as "weight" what is now named "mass" and to use a name such as "force of gravity" for what is now named "weight".
Such a terminology would have kept the continuity with the traditional meanings of the words and would not have offered opportunities for the majority of the people, who even today continue to use those traditional meanings in colloquial language, to be corrected by those who have made an arbitrary choice to assign new meanings to old words.
Unfortunately there exists a very large number of scientific or technical terms whose meaning has been changed some time during the last few centuries, sometimes intentionally, due to questionable decisions, but in many times due to various errors or misunderstandings.
Even when such names reflect very serious errors of those who have coined them, their meaning can no longer be changed, as too much new literature has accumulated, which uses the new meanings.