Natural Blogarithms

Michael Quinion answers the age old question of exactly how much is a “zillion”, a “bazillion”, “gazillion” and of course, a “jillion”. Actually he gives a bit of the background on how billion went from meaning a million million to a thousand million, as well as other related changes. To me the most interesting part is where the SI prefixes are listed. I just recently learned that the there is a measurement of data storage beyond Terabytes (who’d have thought we’d ever need them). From students doing a research project in one of my classes they learned of storage device combining blue laser technology with holography hopes to provide 1.5 exabytes (2^60 or ~10^18 bytes) per storage device which as I understand it is somewhat equal to the amount of data produced in the US daily. (How they measured that, I am not exactly sure). But then again how about those zettabytes (2^60 or ~10^21 bytes) and “a lotta” yottabytes (2^70 or ~10^24 bytes).

Trackback URI | Comments RSS