Quixotic Californian crusade to officially recognize the hellabyte and hellagram is going hella nowhere In 2010, Austin Sendek, then a physics student at UC Davis, created a petition seeking recognition for prefix "hella-" as an official International System of Units (SI) measurement representing 1027. "Northern California is home to many influential research institutions, including the University of California, Davis, the …
Accept it wouldn't though would it, I'll have a 25 Kelvin-gram bag of spuds please. I need to drive 380 kelvin-meters today. Really?
If it's a random number with no context, then any suffix is of no consequence. But no-one [outside of pure maths] talks of a thousand "of anything", it's always "of something"; distance, mass, volume, time, or perhaps temperature
so when you see a value referred to as 247.35Kgms-1 or 247.35kgms-1 do you know if it is talking about kilogram metres per second and not Kelvin (earth)gravity metres per second? and yes, you may well get some combination of those sorts of units so avoiding ambiguity wherever possible does make sense.
Also, sorry - "except" ... standards to maintain!
While we're on the subject of pedantry and maintaining standards, I just thought I'd note a small point of typesetting that I deal with every.single.day: it's s−1 and not s-1. There are big differences in meaning and usage between "-", "–", and "−". I get it – you don't tend to get taught this sh*t, even at university (and it doesn't help that I've had to install AutoHotkey just to produce these symbols with any ease), but I'd like it if more people understood. But then I guess I'd be out of a job if nobody got this stuff wrong.
As you know very well, those differences depend entirely on which style guide or manual of style you subscribe to, and as such are quite subjective. It's probably not worth debating in this forum, though —Knowing the commentardariat, it'd probably devolve into something as silly as how many tittles can dance on the head of a pica pole, and whether or not they are strictly necessary.
At the risk of proving you right re such debates, I would say that I've yet to find a journal worth publishing in (barring, for example, various Chinese journals with impact factors best indicated using negative exponents) that doesn't distinguish between a minus sign and a hyphen. En dashes, on the other hand, are (in my opinion) all too often ignored in favour of hyphens. It's the en dash that tells us the Lennard-Jones potential was the work of a single person while Runge–Kutta methods are the brainchild of two (ignoring, of course, the thorny issue of accurate attribution of scientific achievements).
R and Q are not the official symbols though, they are just convenient conventions used in certain circumstances, Resistance is the Ohm - Ω while charge is the Coulomb - C. The former is often used as a substitute for Ω, but not in official documents unless there is no ambiguity.
Both Q and R seem to me mostly to be used in calculations as "variables":
Rt = R1 + R2
Rt = 1000kΩ + 470Ω
You might type 1000kR but only because your typewriter doesn't have an Ω key or 7-bit ASCII doesn't support it, and only in an unambiguous context. I don't think I've ever seen charge written as "100Q" rather than "100C".
M.
In my experience resistor values are often written as e.g 4k7 1M5 etc. R is often then used for values less than 1k0 e.g 470R, 1R5. i.e. it is a resistor, we know it is ohms so we leave that bit out unless it is less than 1k0 when we use R. Though for the life of me I can't imagine ever needing a 1H5 resistor.
"Or .. I guess most of the positive prefixes are upper case. Why is that, when k for kilo is lower ?"
Tradition. SI was only established in 1960, but the kilogram has been around since the 1700s. The SI system tries to keep everything as consistent as possible, but it also tries to avoid conflicting with conventions that already exist. So any new prefixes will follow the rule that positive are capitals and negative are lower case, but kilo doesn't because it already existed before the convention was established.
That also explains why some things might conflict with others, simply because they already did before anyone really tried standardising things. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to introduce even more new conflicts just because some already exist.
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According to NIST H is not used, just h (for hecto, 10^2).
The negative side recognizes both milli (m) and micro (Greek letter mu).
So the arguments against hella are spurious but as a compromise they could use the Greek H equivalent, the letter Eta.
Or we could just use U for UnitMcUnitFace.
Did you hear about the time some physicists tried to sneak their new unit, the "hoover" into a paper? It's the unit of vacuum noise, a colloquial way of expressing the random-noise analog to the quantum uncertainty in a single mode. Unfortunately, it didn't work. (shame!)
I did once manage to get "tardis" accepted in a paper in Phys Rev A, though, for a space-time version of a sort of inverse invisibility cloak, which looked bigger on the inside. But then I was using it as a description, and not claiming a new sort of unit, which is a much more serious matter.
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`man units` tells me that the only remaining prefixes that aren't the same character as a unit are D I O Q U X - upper case are prefered for positive powers, and a prefix ending in -a (lower case and -o for negative powers). I think I and O would be ruled out for looking like l and 0, and X might be prefered to be reserved for 'unknown'.
So, Dottametres, Quinkametres, Umametres.
the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)'s General Conference on Weight and Measures
They tried in vain to clear up the confusion about billions and trillions in 1948.
Originally and logically a billion (shortened from bi-million) means 2 millions multiplied with each other, i.e. 10^12. Likewise a trillion/tri-million is 3 millions multiplied, i.e. 10^18. Then some countries became confused and decided to shorten those numbers to 10^9 & 10^12, making the words etymologically meaningless.
Since the conference gave up on harmonizing that, we're stuck with this ambiguity with most of Europe using the original meaning. Whereas the Brits already brexited in '74 and waddled after the Americans for these words. As do Canadians when speaking English, while in French they stick to the original meaning. So you always have to question the validity of these words, which might just be a mistranslation.
The supposed "strong opposition" is from a very small, but loud, number of bible thumpers. Fortunately, their numbers are dwindling with each generation. Probably dying off as a result of refusing to believe in the modern world and the things that it has brought us. Like medicine.
And I'll take a God's name in vain even if one chooses to prove that it exists. (Which has never happened, ever. I wonder why?) Nothing is deserving of worship. Period.
I'm confused. Does the sun weigh 2.2 hellatons or a hellagram?
Both values are quoted in the article, and it seems to me that this very confusion argues strongly against the new term.
Anyway I always think of it as 2.0x10^30 kg, which is easy to remember if you're a bit nuts about useless numbers.
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