6 ms·

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.

• zokier 4y ago
  16 and 17 are not divisible by 3
  • rockostrich 4y ago
    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.
    • idiotsecant 4y ago
      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.
      • chrisshroba 4y ago
        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
        • idiotsecant 4y ago
          ah yes, the centipede. Famously the unit of measure of one hundred pedes.
          • throwaway821909 4y ago
            well... yes? > Centipedes (from New Latin centi-, "hundred", and Latin pes, pedis, "foot")
        • GuB-42 4y ago
          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 metric unit equivalent to the square hectometer or 10000 square meters. We most likely kept the name because "hectare" sounds better than "square hectometer". As expected, 1 hectare is worth 100 ares, but ares and its other multiples are much less used than hectares.
          • bruce511 4y ago
            Ares is 100 Square metres. Not to be confused with acres, which is around 4047 Square metres. 2471 acres per hectare.
            • InitialLastName 4y ago
              So you're saying there are roughly 2.5 hectacres per hectare.
      • runarberg 4y ago
        > a lot of our natural experience of the universe is within 3 orders of magnitude of the base units we use. That may be in large part because of the unit prefixes we use. That is we think of these things in 3 orders of magnitudes because our unit prefixes come in three orders of magnitude but not the other way around. I think a much likelier explanation is the fact that many European languages (most importantly French and English) stop naming each decimal order after a thousand. If there was a word for ten-thousand—say fiorthom—but not a hundred-thousand (ten-fiorthom), surely these prefixes would map be multiples of 10⁴ as well.
    • toast0 4y ago
      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 millions.
      • Arnavion 4y ago
        (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.
        • alex028502 4y ago
          It's a shame they didn't want to go one more 00, because that nicely lines up with a billion ... Or milliard, or giga
      • rippercushions 4y ago
        In Japan and China you use groups of 10,000, so there's 万 (1e4), the largest bill (10,000 yen); 億 (1e8, 100 million), the approximate population of Japan and a convenient unit for housing prices in yen; and 兆 (1e12, 1 trillion), which is used for eg really expensive infra projects like new bullet trains. On paper, there are much larger units too, but they are never used.
    • zokier 4y ago
      Even the old deci/deca/hecto/centi prefixes are largely avoided, especially in science/engineering.
      • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        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.
        • InitialLastName 4y ago
          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).
      • nicwilson 4y ago
        they do come up though, e.g. blood (dL)
• _Algernon_ 4y ago
  10^3 is the same length as "kilo". 10^6 is the same length as "mega". 10^9 is the same length as "giga". Why is length suddenly an argument against new prefixes?
• c3534l 4y ago
  No one is ever going to say, or remember, "a ten to the twenty seven byte of data."
• naniwaduni 4y ago
  "10^27" is longer than "ronna" measured by character width, by keystrokes, or by finger travel. It's also significantly longer than "R".