21 November 2022

Planet Earth has a mass of six ronnagrams

More or less.
"In a vote at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles on Friday, the International System of Units (SI) embraced four new prefixes with immediate effect, marking the first such changes in more than 30 years.

At the top end of the scale are the new prefixes ronna, which stands for a billion billion billion, and quetta, which is a thousand times larger still. At the bottom end is ronto, meaning a billionth of a billionth of a billionth, and quecto, which is a thousand times smaller than that.

The arrival of the new prefixes means the Earth can now be said to weigh six ronnagrams, and Jupiter about two quettagrams. An electron weighs about a rontogram, and a single bit of data stored on a mobile phone adds about 10 quectograms to its mass..."

5 comments:

  1. You mean its mass is 6 ronnagrams. Weight is measured in units of force (like Newtons).

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    Replies
    1. You are absolutely correct. Title amended, though I will defer on filling the citatioin with [sic]s.

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  2. any information on the basis of ronna/ronto prefixes? the first connection that worriedly came to my mind was one time Sci-Fi author & controversial religion founder: L. Ron Hubbard

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    1. The explanation is a little underwhelming:

      "And so, drawing from the Latin and Greek words for nine (novem, ennea) and 10 (decem, deka), with some poetic license to make the terms more easily pronounced, he came up with ronna, quecca, ronto, and quecto."

      Source: https://www.science.org/content/article/you-know-kilo-mega-and-giga-metric-system-ready-ronna-and-quecca

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  3. After Drabkikker: Quecca sounds like quick. Ronto sounds like pronto. Maybe that's why.

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