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Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in
- _8j50 4y agoI hope there is no mother called Ronna somewhere. Terrible joke.
- Octoth0rpe 4y agoDamn, I was really hoping bronto or hella would get some traction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_prefix#Unofficial_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_prefix#Unofficial_prefixe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella#SI_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella#SI_prefix
- foxyv 4y ago> However metric prefixes need to be shortened to just their first letter—and B and H were already taken, ruling out bronto and hella.
- wlesieutre 4y agoLessons learned from milli and mega. Oops!
- Aardwolf 4y agoNo problem there, SI prefixes are case sensitive. But micro, on the other hand...
- aikinai 4y agoMicro is a μ, so it’s fine too.
- celeritascelery 4y agoIn practice people seem to use “u” instead
- wlesieutre 4y agoSo what I'm hearing is we could've used hella and given it a greek letter
- leephillips 4y agoFunniest comment I’ve seen in a while.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoNot 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.
- schoen 4y agoMaybe we could have called it ἑ, like 10 ἑb = 10 hellabits.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago(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/, 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.)
- anticensor 4y agoCyrillic small be (б) and Greek small chi (χ) could have been used instead.
- adastra22 4y agoThere are obvious problems with both those prefixes.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoLet's propose ñoñograms then, seems like anything goes.
- krallja 4y agoCould get some cool abbreviations too, like のg and 노g.
- madcaptenor 4y agohow is B taken?
- lifthrasiir 4y agoByte, as per ISO/IEC 80000 (which includes SI in the Part 1).
- thaumasiotes 4y agoByte's not a prefix. Is it a problem for anyone when millimeters are written "mm"?
- lifthrasiir 4y agoI don't know. Maybe new metric prefixes are subject to tighter requirements, while older prefixes like milli- are here to stay.
- brewmarche 4y agoUnits can be multiplied though. If N were a prefix you couldn’t distinguish Newtonmetres from N many metres I think older prefixes are just grandfathered in
- MayeulC 4y agoWell, you don't have to use a dingle letter either. Deca is da.
- mxuribe 4y agoYeah hella would have been great!
- halosghost 4y agoWould be nice if it linked to the actual document. See Resolution 3 in the resolutions document [0]. [0]: https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-2022.pdf https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-20...
- Aardwolf 4y agoI guess that gives us new binary prefixes as well, we can now express data sizes in robibit, quebibit, robibyte and quebibyte!
- joeyh 4y agoWill need an update to IEC 80000-13 won't it? Or does the standard define a formula to derive the names from the metric prefixes?
- rg2004 4y agoDandy. A memento of the corona virus
- bjt2n3904 4y agoA 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?
- zirkonit 4y agoIt'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.
- aikinai 4y agoThe 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.
- lifthrasiir 4y agoWhich 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").
- argentier 4y agoIndians use lakh (100 000 -> 5) and crore (10 000 000 -> 7). They also group the digits differently.
- ryzvonusef 4y agoQuetta (10^30) is also the name of a city in Pakistan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetta
- rikkipitt 4y agoThe way I remember Earth's approximate mass is the fact it's 10 times Avogadro's number in kg. My physics teacher always had a great way of drilling in these tidbits.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y agoGold.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vitiral 4y agoTake ten moles of earth, fire, wind and water. What do you have? Captain planet!
- opwieurposiu 4y agoYes and the circumference of the earth is about 40 million meters. This is because a meter was originally supposed to be 1/10E6 the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris.
- Someone 4y agoNitpick: 1/10⁷, not 1/10⁶. They picked the power of ten that gave a reasonably-sized unit of length. They also made things complex by then picking a unit of mass that’s inconsistent with that: a gram isn’t the mass of 1m³ of water, but of 1/10⁶ m³ of water (a cubic meter is 10³ liters, and a liter of water weighs 10³ grams) Centimeter-gram-second (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimetre–gram–second_system_of_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centimetre–gram–second_system_...) really is superior in that sense (but of course, that’s relative to the arbitrary choice of using water to convert between mass and volume, and from that, length)
- SJSque 4y ago10E6 = 10×10⁶ = 10⁷, so you can unpick that nit!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NKosmatos 4y agoFrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system 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.”
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thechao 4y agoWeird: > https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/metric-conversion-act-of-1975 https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/metric-conversion-act-of-197... > https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/executive-order-12770 https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/executive-order-12770 The US government hasn't been great in converting US industry to metric. But ... it's a bit disingenuous to say we didn't even try.
- anonporridge 4y agoI believe we have Ronald Reagan to thank for cancelling our efforts from the 70s.
- krallja 4y agoA ronna-Reagan is 10^27 Reagans.
- jerf 4y agoOne ronna-reagan is approximately 4% of the sun's mass: https://www.google.com/search?q=%28185+pounds%29+*+10%5E27+%2F+solar+mass&ei=9MB3Y-vUOuylptQPufCdiA0&ved=0ahUKEwjrnqfgoLj7AhXskokEHTl4B9EQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=%28185+pounds%29+*+10%5E27+%2F+solar+mass https://www.google.com/search?q=%28185+pounds%29+*+10%5E27+%... At least if I have that right. A single Reagan's mass is from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ronald-Reagan-1750.html https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ronald-Reagan-1750.html Or, if you prefer, our sun as about 25 ronna-Reagans.
- idlewords 4y agoREAL PLANETS HAVE CURVES
- rnhmjoj 4y agoIs anyone seriously using prefixes above Giga, besides for counting bytes or boasting numbers in popular science articles? In physics, in practice you either state the number in exponential notation and don't care abut it or for brevity introduce a more appropriate unit: barns (10⁻²⁸ m²) and electronvolts (10⁻¹⁹ J) in nuclear physics or solar mass (~10³⁰ kg) in astrophysics, etc.
- traxys 4y agoIn High Performance Computing the most recent Top1 machine ils counted in Exaflops, so there's quite some talk aubout exascale computing.
- picometer 4y agoTerawatts come to mind.
- jdrek1 4y ago> electronvolts (10⁻¹⁹ J) in nuclear physics CERN is at TeV ranges so yes, even in different units we use high prefixes. Might not come up in your every day small talk but they are used.
- burkaman 4y ago> counting bytes or boasting numbers in popular science articles Why are these not serious usages? They are concepts that need to be communicated, that's what words are for.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoBoasting in popular science articles with large prefixes is hardly better communication compared to scientific notation. If the prefixes aren't commonly used (anything above tera/peta really isn't), then the majority of people have no frame of reference for what it is any more than it being "a big number".
- Symbiote 4y agoElectricity production for a country is reasonable measured in TWh, and I think I've seen this in newspapers discussing energy/gas in Europe. But from Wikipedia: > In the United Kingdom ... Demand for electricity in 2014 was 34.42 GW on average (301.7 TWh over the year) coming from a total electricity generation of 335.0 TWh. We aren't there yet for power: > The synchronous grid of Continental Europe is the largest synchronous electrical grid (by connected power) in the world. ... In 2009, 667 GW of production capacity was connected to the grid
- GenerocUsername 4y agoQuick, someone tell the guy behind universal paperclips
- wolfi1 4y agoI'm disappointed that hella has not become a prefix
- frob 4y agoI'll give the grad students at UC Davis props for trying: https://theaggie.org/2010/02/18/uc-davis-student-gives-hella-new-meaning/ https://theaggie.org/2010/02/18/uc-davis-student-gives-hella.... My lab at the time slipped hella- into a few conference presentations here and there. We had to back our university. I always remember it getting a few chuckles.
- standardUser 4y agoI'm glad they saved us from that ridiculous terminology. It reminds me of Futurama, where every-freaking-thing had to be some pun or weak reference.
- tmtvl 4y agoYou'd be surprised how many erstwhile lame puns our daily conversation includes. Ever use the term "nothing"?
- temptemptemp111 4y ago
- troelsSteegin 4y agoVia https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03747-9 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 (10^−24).
- singularity2001 4y agoThe 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… 10^16 == tento-seize …
- zokier 4y ago16 and 17 are not divisible by 3
- rockostrich 4y agoIs 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.
- idiotsecant 4y agoIt'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.
- 4y ago
- jl6 4y agoSo 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-hdd-industry-update/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2022/08/21/c2q-2022...
- count 4y agoData xfer'd vs. data stored.
- drtgh 4y agoEdit: As burkaman said I misspelled units.
- burkaman 4y ago6 ronnagrams, not 6 ronnakilograms.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hinkley 4y agoPssh. Only 6 ronnagrams? That's barely a planet at all.
- IvyMike 4y agoA couple of decades and several jobs ago I wrote some file transfer code that displayed human readable sizes, and as a joke to myself, I included prefixes up to yottabytes. Careful readers of the code should have flagged this as impossible because anything above exa- is impossible using 64 bits, but it got thru review and as far as I know the code lives on to this day. I'm hoping someone adds these new prefixes.
- Aardwolf 4y ago> "Jupiter, that's about two quettagrams," he added—a two followed by 30 zeros. But the sun is 2000 quettagrams... looks like we need another higher prefix
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoExactly 1 Solar mass.
- geenew 4y agoNeed an epoch on that
- zardo 4y agoNow that we have 10, will the next set just repeat? E.g. kiloquettagrams, megaquettameters
- throwaway81523 4y agoAre you telling me that a Ronnagram isn't a message from Ron, delivered by Western Union? And for stuff like the mass of the earth, why not 6e27 kg or whatever it is, instead of these weird incantations? Ugh.
- illys 4y agoPretty nice table here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix 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 scientific needs. So they might need to move again soon. However the SI has exhausted the available stock of letters. Maybe Greek letters next time like micro for 10^-6. Anyway does it really matter for IT people? I have seen so many people mixing up bit and byte, milli- and mega- as well. There are countless usages of mb all over the Internet to express MB.
- labster 4y agoUppercase MB is megabytes, lowercase mb is millibars. Both can go through a series of tubes, but millibars are also useful in dump trucks, to make the wheels go round and round.
- gregmac 4y agoDo 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)
- allanrbo 4y ago
- giantg2 4y agoTitle sounds like the basis for a yo momma joke.
- homonculus1 4y agoEarth weighs 0.6 yomommagrams
- rcoveson 4y agoWhy is yomomma- a prefix to grams? That doesn't imply yo' momma so fat, it implies yo' momma so.
- homonculus1 4y agoBecause that's where the rhyme is, dummy.
- masswerk 4y agoHaving this out of the way, it's time to address the short scale versus long scale issue. (ducks) ;-)
- NeoTar 4y agoThat’s been addressed. In English you use the short scale. Other languages use whichever scale they want.
- ordu 4y agoThe strange thing is the symmetry. Why these prefixes cover multipliers from 10^-30 to 10^30? Why not 10^-20 to 10^40? Where the symmetry comes from? Is it just people think that symmetry is a good thing, and for example they added 10^-30 despite the lack of demand? Or there is some deeper reason? Or it is more like one of those coincidences?
- robomartin 4y ago> 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.
- adrian_b 4y agoIt is very important to distinguish the 2 physical quantities whose standard names are now "force" and "mass", but it is debatable whether it was good choice to arbitrarily assign to the word "weight" the meaning of a force and to establish the new word "mass" (new with this meaning) for what is now called "mass". 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.
- mesozoic 4y agoweight or mass? Weight doesn't make any sense
- _kst_ 4y agoSo we have "ronna" or "R" for 10^27 and "quetta" or "Q" for 10^30. I haven't seen the official binary equivalents. For example, we have "yotta" or "Y" for 10^24, and "yobi" or "Yi" for 2^80. Are we going have "robi" and "quebi"? I presume the abbreviations will be "Ri" and "Qi". (I guess we don't need fractional binary prefixes. There's not much use for nanobytes.) Of course since this was just announced today, I'm not really complaining.
- arunc 4y agoAnd here in US, we are stuck with imperial units like it was 1800s: oz, pounds, inches, feet, miles, etc for all common usage. When a foreigner visits here, the first thing they realize is how US has truly siloed itself from the rest of the world.
- bonestamp2 4y agoHow is "Ronna" pronounced... "Row Nah" or "Ron Ah"? I assume it's like "donna", but if I don't ask I'm going to say it wrong for sure.
- Asraelite 4y ago"Ron Ah"
- hitpointdrew 4y agoCan 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’t mass a better way to measure and classify rather than weight?
- Asraelite 4y agoIt's pretty simple: colloquially "weight" is a synonym for mass. That's how it's being used here.
- yellowapple 4y agoWe hella-as-SI-prefix enthusiasts have once again been hella shafted.