Posted 03.03.2010 at 11:00 am
17 Comments
Hella Kitty
ingorr, via Flickr.com
Beloved by Bay Area natives and loathed by the rest of the country, the term "hella" has entered the general American lexicon thanks to the combined efforts of No Doubt and South Park. And now, if University of California, Davis, physics student Austin Sendek gets enough signatures, it might enter the scientific dictionary as the prefix for numbers with 10^27 zeroes.
The International System of Units (SI) provides standards for scientific weights and measurements, like Kelvin and the mole, as well as the prefixes for naming quantities of different magnitudes. Thanks to advances in computing speed and storage, high order prefixes like peta-, giga-, and even yotta- have become familiar to lay people, as well as scientists. Primarily, those prefixes come from the Greek word for a particular number.
That's where Austin Sendek's petition comes in. Currently, the SI prefixes stop at 10^24, or yotta. Sendek selected 10^27 for hella-, rather than the obvious next step of 10^25, because the 10^27 magnitude appears frequently in measurements relating to the sun. Under Sendek's proposed naming schema, the sun would weight 2.2 hellatons, and release 0.3 hellawatts of energy.
You can help Sendek by going to this Facebook page, and signing his petition to the SI unit's international regulatory body. Or, if you cringe at the thought of this obnoxious slang term proliferating further, just like, chillax dude, it's all good.
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This is fantastic, and hilarious. I'm sorry, though, I have to point out that 10^25 would not at all be the 'obvious next step' for a name. This has nothing to do with the measurements relating to the sun either. We have always named every third power, whether that is mill, bill, trill, or mega, giga, tera etc. Hella would be a 1000 yottas. We wouldn't name 10^25 (10 Yottas) any more than we would have a different name for 10^7 (10 Million). -GP
ur gonna need a hellalot of signatures.
i hate those 5 letters more than any other combination. it is not even a word. it is stupid talk used by stupid people. i went to school near the bay and dear god every says that crap. i petition to make that "word" illegal. all who say it get their tongue removed, haha. seriously, face palm at out how stupid this is
That would be hellasweeeeeet!
So, "va" is a suffix that means "order of magnitude"? As in, you are going to need a Hellava lot of signatures on that petition?
stupid or not, this is as epic as 'meh' making it into the dictionary.
How about continuing the series with other regional favs
Say the uffda and the yeehaw
e.g. Black holes have been known to exert an attractive force of 50 uffdagrams at a distance of 3 yeehawmeters
Wouldn't really be any sillier
hah. yeehaw. that's a good one.
Funny how the person who says stupid people use the word "hella" has spelling and grammar errors in his paragraph.
Personally i think it would be awesome. hellatons has a nice ring to it.
WIN.
Oh foo, they're only suddenly having a problem with expanding past 10^24 because they think this idea is trifling. And that if ignored will pass.
Well, they are wrong. I mean, the answer is so clear: they are insisting that terms be well established in Greek or Latin. What is more Greek than Hellas? A unit of Hellas would certainly be appropriately contracted to Hella--thus making the hellaton the proper unit of measure.
Note to the author:
At the end of the first paragraph, you write "numbers with 10^27 zeroes." I think you mean "numbers with 27 zeroes," or really, "numbers with order of magnitude 27." All 27 digits may not be zeroes.
Well, if 10^24 is already "yotta", then it seems to me that 10^27 should be "lotta". If that were the case, then the mass of the Earth would be 5.9742 lottagrams. Which certainly is a lotta grams.
Hella Kitty is a very ridiculous and cool.
Where still pictures of Hella Kitty?
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