{"id":382019,"date":"2010-03-02T16:47:09","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T21:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=4203"},"modified":"2010-03-02T16:47:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-02T21:47:09","slug":"hella%e2%80%a6yes-cosmic-variance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/382019","title":{"rendered":"Hella\u2026yes! | Cosmic Variance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A physics student here at UC Davis, Austin Sendek, has launched a <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.makehellaofficial.blogspot.com\/\">campaign<\/a> to add another designator to the list of numeric<a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/\"> SI prefixes<\/a> such as kilo-, mega-, etc. to cover 10<sup>27<\/sup>: hella. For example, 1 hellagram would be 10<sup>27<\/sup> grams, or 1000 <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Binary_prefix\">yottagrams<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The term &#8220;hella&#8221; is one I first heard my sister-in-law utter in the context &#8220;that ski run was hella fun!&#8221;, which I immediately took as a shorthand for &#8220;a hell of a lot of&#8221;. I&#8217;ve since learned that it originated, reportedly, in San Francisco to mean just that, or &#8220;very&#8221; in general, as in &#8220;that tee shirt is hella awesome&#8221; &#8211; it&#8217;s not an uncommon utterance to hear here in northern California. <\/p>\n<p>And, 10<sup>27<\/sup> is hella big, to be sure. A hellasecond is ten billion times the age of the universe, and the mass of the earth is about 6 hellagrams.<\/p>\n<p>It seems that hella is poised to go viral&#8230;there are nearly 24,000 fans of the <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-Official-Petition-to-Establish-Hella-as-the-SI-Prefix-for-1027\/277479937276?ref=ts\">facebook<\/a> petition, and it even made the <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/xml.truveo.com\/rd?i=3486965010&#038;a=820309f69dc5f77ab3a2d204313cdbf0&#038;p=1&#038;h=4b8d86cf410ccec:48ded1d6ddb09360c0c25f0399258c5b\">local news last night in Sacramento<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Who decides such things? The <a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/www.bipm.org\/en\/home\/\">International Bureau of Weights and Measures<\/a>, that&#8217;s who. They added yotta in 1991. Sign the petition to them at the facebook site!<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/n-fG0Vr6Z9EYgG7Jajtav3u37y8\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/n-fG0Vr6Z9EYgG7Jajtav3u37y8\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><br \/>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\"  href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/n-fG0Vr6Z9EYgG7Jajtav3u37y8\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/n-fG0Vr6Z9EYgG7Jajtav3u37y8\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap><\/a><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/CosmicVarianceBlog\/~4\/P8fP0Uuxeu0\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/DiscoverMag\/~4\/ot_YVqL1cgM\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A physics student here at UC Davis, Austin Sendek, has launched a campaign to add another designator to the list of numeric SI prefixes such as kilo-, mega-, etc. to cover 1027: hella. For example, 1 hellagram would be 1027 grams, or 1000 yottagrams. The term &#8220;hella&#8221; is one I first heard my sister-in-law utter [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}