(Roughly) Daily

We’re running out of names; Elizabeth Gibney explains…

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10²⁴ bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. Now, the booming growth of the data sphere has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes beyond that magnitude, to describe the outrageously big and small.

Representatives from governments worldwide, meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November, voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10²⁷ and 10³⁰, and ronto and quecto signify 10⁻²⁷ and 10⁻³⁰. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram.

This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when the organization added zetta (10²¹), zepto (10⁻²¹), yotta (10²⁴) and yocto (10⁻²⁴). In that case, metrologists were adapting to fit the needs of chemists, who wanted a way to express SI units on the scale of Avogadro’s number — the 6 × 10²³ units in a mole, a measure of the quantity of substances. The more familiar prefixes peta and exa were added in 1975…

Prolific generation of data drove the need for prefixes that denote 10²⁷ and 10³⁰: “How many yottabytes in a quettabyte? Extreme numbers get new names,” from @LizzieGibney in @Nature.

And in other news from the world of metrics: “Do not adjust your clock: scientists call time on the leap second.”

* Jaws

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As we try to keep up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that 60 Minutes, which had premiered two months earlier, introduced its trademark “ticking stopwatch” opening logo/transition. 60 Minutes is, of course, the most-watched television news show in history.

Since near the show’s inception in 1968, the opening of 60 Minutes features a stopwatch. The Aristo (Heuer) design first appeared in 1978. On October 29, 2006, the background changed to red, the title text color changed to white, and the stopwatch was shifted to the upright position. This version was used from 1992 to 2006 (the Square 721 type was changed in 1998). Source