Metric Prefixes for Dummies

Metric prefixes applied to big data

We here at the Antisocial Network firmly believe that there is no such thing as useless information, at least once you get beyond being able to name every Kardashian. Whatever the case, we feel that when someone asks for the definition of a word, it's to their benefit to understand a) how it came into the language and b) what might be some related words. That's especially true if, like R. Kayne at WiseGEEK.com, you find it necessary to use 360 or so words to try to answer the question, "What Is a Petabyte?"

With that in mind, we're pleased to report that Kayne managed to reword the definition of "petabyte" from one of the online dictionaries without making any major errors. Well, without any major factual errors; Kayne's grammatical skills seem somewhat lacking (especially for someone who edited a couple hundred WiseGEEK posts). Take a gander at,

"In the world of ever-growing data capacity, a petabyte represents the frontier just ahead of the terabyte, which itself runs just ahead of the gigabyte." Wait, "the frontier just ahead of"? Or "runs just ahead of"? WTF is that construction supposed to mean, anyway? We think native English speakers would be inclined to say "just beyond," ourselves. Once that clumsiness is out of the way, we took a closer look at what Kayne wrote. We learn such minutia as, "In the late 1980s, a large hard disk was considered 80 megabytes...  It’s a humbling thought that the mighty petabyte stores individual bits."

All nice and cutesy, although – once again – we're nonplussed by the syntax in R's first sentence above. Perhaps all Kayne was doing was rewording something s/he'd read, changing a sentence that makes more sense to avoid charges of plagiarism. We image something like, "Eighty megabytes was considered a large hard disk in the 1980s."

Besides a rather tenuous grasp of English syntax, Kayne seems to have failed to grasp the essential question behind the word "petabyte," which – once you get the numerical definition out of the way – becomes, "What does 'peta-' mean, anyway?" Well, it has nothing to do with The Hunger Games... (yeah, we know, his name's actually Peeta).

Here goes, kids: "peta-" is the SI prefix¹ that means "one quadrillion." It's the prefix between "tera-" (a trillion) and "exa-" (a quintillion). For people who understand scientific notation (we bet that doesn't include Kayne), the prefix means 10¹⁵, a one with fifteen zeros after it.
"Petabyte" isn't the only use of the prefix; heck, it's not even the first! Scientists (again, that probably excludes R.) use the prefix in describing frequency (petahertz), time (a petasecond is about 32 million years) and distance (a light year is just short of 10 petameters.

So we think Kayne blew it by wasting 300 words gushing about big computers. We also think R. is a classic candidate for Dumbass of the Day, what with not even coming close to mentioning the meaning of the prefix. So there.

¹ SI is the International System of Units; a set of standards for measuring physical attributes. You may be more familiar with the SI prefixes for one thousand and one million, respectively "kilo-" and "mega-."

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