On Monday 17 March 2008 21:33, Ziser, Jesse wrote: > Life is hard without centi- and deci- and the like when one is working in > square or cubic dimensions, especially if you also don't like liters. > > "How come this bottle only has one million, seven hundred fifty thousand > cubic millimeters and that one is one million eight?" > > versus > > "How come this tank only has one point seven five cubic decimeters and that > one is one point eight?" > > Please remember that the factor between adjacent units without using the > bastard prefixes is only a thousand for one-dimensional units but it is a > jaw-dropping billion for 3D units!
And it is a trillion between the quartic millimeter (unit of a quantity called "second moment of an area" or "moment of inertia of an area", which is used to compute how much a beam bends) and the quartic meter. But unlike volumes, which everybody uses, very few people raise millimeters to the fourth power. Pierre
