5 ms·
Missed opportunity to use the term megagram. Edit: I mean gigagram
by leros 4y ago
Missed opportunity to use the term megagram.
Edit: I mean gigagram
- pkage 4y agoWouldn't that be a gigagram? Even more cool.
- dylan604 4y agohow ever you measure it, the street value of all that powder has got to be astronomical
- nordsieck 4y ago> Missed opportunity to use the term megagram. Did you mean gigagram?
- leros 4y agoTwo comments saying this. Doesn't mega mean 10^6 aka 1 million?
- aidenn0 4y agoyes, but "kilo" is 10^3 already so 10^6 * 10^3 = 10^9 -> giga
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- Zamicol 4y agoAlso missed the opportunity to say "10M hectograms" or "100M decagrams".
- mc32 4y agoI think that would insinuate more precision than their methodology for measurement could provide.
- perilunar 4y ago> "The impact ejected at least one million kilograms of rock from Dimorphos’s 4.3-billion-kilogram mass. The debris formed a tail that stretched for tens of thousands of kilometres behind the asteroid." "one million kilograms" = one gigagram "4.3-billion-kilogram" = 4.3 teragram "tens of thousands of kilometres" = tens of megametres. I don't understand the media's reluctance to use large SI prefixes for mass and distance, when they'll happily use them for electrical units.
- shric 4y agoIt's also a peculiarity of kilograms. The kilogram rather than the gram is the SI base unit for mass. Thus it's normal to use e.g. 1e6 kg rather than 1e9 g.
- perilunar 4y agoBut metre is an SI base unit and people say "thousands of kilometres" instead of megametres.
- edrxty 4y agoI think they're just not well understood by most people. 1000Kg is a small car. 1Mg is...who the fuck knows. You can tell someone a building weighs 1Gg but they're gonna stare at you funny until you tell them it's about 1000 small cars. OTOH, 1KHz has no basis in physical reality for normal people but they know 1KHz is 1000x faster than 1MHz so it works nicely for things like "is my new computer faster than my old computer" (at least a decade ago, I don't see clocks advertised much at all anymore).
- kennethrc 4y ago...GHz ?
- murkt 4y ago1 megagram is a ton, which is widely used. A lot of stuff is measured in tons, including cars (“this car weighs almost two tons, which is pretty heavy for a sports car”), cargo (20-ton train car), etc. It stops on the ton, though - “40 thousand tons of grain” - gigagram isn’t used.
- pitaj 4y agoOr 1000 tonnes