Subject:
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Re: Mini, Micro, Maxi, Macro, Kilo, etc. (was: Re: Pink spaceship)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Sun, 17 Oct 1999 23:54:05 GMT
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Viewed:
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87 times
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In lugnet.space, Todd Lehman writes:
> In lugnet.space, "Mike Poindexter" <lego@poindexter.cc> writes:
> > Mini is 1/1,000 and micro is 1/1,000,000.
>
> Yes, Micro- is 10^-6, but Mini- is not necessarily 10^-3. Mini- is any size
> less than 1.
>
> Milli- is 10^-3.
>
>
> > Macro is 1,000 isn't it?
>
> Macro is any size greater than 1 or greater than usual. It *can* be 10^3,
> but it isn't necessarily 10^3. Macroeconomics, for example, isn't about
> economics on the 1000x scale, nor is a macro-zoom lens a 1000x lens.
>
> Kilo- is what equals 10^3...unless you're talking about Kilobytes, in which
> case it means 2^10 instead of 10^3...unless you buy into this new "KKB"
> nonsense kicking around[1], in which case a Kilobyte has been redefined to
> 10^3 bytes and a "Kibibyte" is now what a "Kilobyte" used to be, namely 2^10
> bytes. :-p
>
>
> > [...]
> > Macrofig would then be better to describe large scale buildings. As the • old
> > people and/or technic figs have been refered to as megafigs,
>
> I've never heard the old LEGO people referred to as "megafigs," but I have
> heard them referred to as "maxifigs." Where did you hear/see "megafig"?
> Mega- is 10^6, so a "megafig" would be a 1000000x fig.
>
>
> > what would be macrofig?
>
> That reminds me of an old Marvel comic book called The Micronauts, in which
> there was a Microverse and a Macroverse. (We humans existed in the
> Macroverse, IIRC.)
>
> Anyway, while it's clear that "minifig" came about directly from TLG's name
> Mini-Figure™, it's not clear how "maxifig" came about as a juxtoposition
> from "minifig" (that is, as opposed to "macrofig"). It's possible that the
> pre-existing feminine product terms "minipad" and "maxipad" may have had
> some sort of influence. (This is just speculation.) AFAIK, there's no such
> thing as a "macropad."
>
> --Todd
>
> [1] http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
>
>
> [followups to lugnet.off-topic.geek]
I suppose I should have had more soda before I wrote that. I got very little
sleep last night.
Megafig is what they have at Legoland and is also on Joe Davenport's web site.
They actually have their own name (Legoland) but I have forgotten what it is.
True, it is not even near a mega, but dodecafig, sesquintafig and centifig
just don't sound very cool. Kilofig sounds pretty cool, though.
The renaming of the KB from 1,024 bytes to 1,000 bytes was from the hard disk
marketers, I believe. That was the first time I saw it - my 3.1 GB hard drive
is 2.88 GB. Most people who sell things try to make things sound bigger than
they actually are. I recall (a long time ago) when I saw a computer and asked
if it had 640K. The salesman told me that it had 640,000 bytes of memory,
expandable to a million bytes. I said, "One meg?" He said, "One MILLION
bytes" as if it was an impossibly large sum. My Apple IIgs had 6.25 MB RAM at
the time, so I was not impressed. But I digress...
One of the major problems I still have with Lego is scale and it will always
be so. After all, it is not in scale to itself and cannot easily be, due to
the nature of the studs.
Mike
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