Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by logfromblammo 2881 days ago
Even then,

  10^3 = thousand
  10^6 = million
  10^9 = billion
  10^12 = trillion
  10^15 = quadrillion, or thousand trillion
  10^18 = quintillion, or million trillion
  10^21 = sextillion, or billion trillion
  10^24 = heptillion, or trillion trillion
  10^27 = octillion, or thousand trillion trillion
  10^30 = nonillion, or million trillion trillion
  10^33 = decillion, or billion trillion trillion
  10^36 = undecillion, or trillion trillion trillion
One of those numbering conventions is not tremendously useful, and the other is very very very stupid. It compounds with the knowledge that some people call 10^9 "a milliard" rather than "a billion". This is why we have SI unit prefixes, and write numbers ending with an exponent of 10.

And here I was, assuming each "pack of butter" was one of those 10g single-serving packs (although some are only 7.65g). I didn't check it against the "tonnes" number in the article. In the US, a "pack of butter" could also be a box containing 4 sticks 113 g each, totaling 454 grams, because butter in the US is sold by the pound. Apparently, they are 250g elsewhere.

And a (metric) tonne is already 1000 kg, or 1 Mg. There is also the long ton, which is 1016 kg, and the short ton, which is 907 kg.

The obfuscated number is therefore 1x10^40 g, which is even larger than standard metric prefixes can express, so we'd probably write it as 1x10^37 kg, for some reason.

So my previous math was wrong. That's 5 million butter-stars the size of our sun, or enough butter to form a slippery, spreadable black hole as massive as the one at the heart of our galaxy. I guess from this, we can calculate the size of Audthumbla the giant space-cow?