h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Icy North,

>>>>Well I could add a table, but there's already one in A471476.

Hey, you're right!

I wouldn't bother, in that case.

HN

Entry: Nano the Dwarf - A Guide to Decimal Prefixes - A28851546
Author: Icy North - U225620

Excellent entry

I have a few very minor suggestions. One thing that I didn't like was the persistent use of computing terms as examples: it seems a little bit contrived and any many cases they're not even correct, strictly speaking. And of course you have another excellent entry covering that stuff

I would natually have expected the examples used to be actual physical constants, e.g. mass of earth, speed of light, width of an atom, frequency of visible light, charge of electron etc etc, than some arbitrary number from a PC spec sheet.

Deci-

>>Again, this prefix is rarely seen outside Europe. It is legal for UK trade only in terms of the decimetre, the square decimetre and the cubic decimetre, which is equivalent to the litre. <<

It is still by far the most widely used prefix for the Bel; this would make a better example.

>>Although in widespread use for the mass of nuclear warheads and the like, the megatonne is frowned upon, and we should strictly use the teragram.<<

Megatonne is not the mass of a nuclear warhead (the rockets aren't that big!) as I'm sure you know, it's the equivalent mass of TNT needed to achieve the same yield.

>>and gigahertz (GHz): a measure of clock speeds in large computer processors.<<

This one grates a bit: GHz is not a measure of clock speeds in large computer processors, it's just a measure of frequency. A UHF radio signal would be measured in GHz for example.

>>You may find some very large computer storage systems rated in petabytes (PB).<<

And again. Visible light is in the PHz range.

>>As we saw earlier, it still isn't quite high enough a millesimal prefix to render the weight of the Earth in grammes,<<

The moon is 73.5 Yg I think, which might be a better example.

>>One area where prefixes are universally absent is money. We seem to prefer the sound of 'one million pounds' to 'one megapound'. <<

Slight contradiction here - you've already pointed out we often use K to refer to thousands (though admittedly never kilopounds, so I know what you're getting at).

Great comments, Dave - thanks.

I'll get correcting...

I think I've incorporated most of those now, Dave. Thanks again!

... and I've added some info on femtometre, exametre and zettametre.

Icy

It's still missing the para-metre, the penta-metre and the gaso-metre

Ah, we are liking very much your scout humour.

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