this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
53 points (96.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35838 readers
1193 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I know the ng means nanogram

But I’m curious how would I say the above line of 2.1 ng/kg

For context I got it from this paragraph

a lethal dose of 1.3–2.1 ng/kg in humans

Would it be

2.1 nanogram per kilogram?

Also if I wanted to write that as a decimal number how would i write that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 44 points 5 months ago (14 children)

"A lethal dose of one point three to two point one (or one and three tenths to two and one tenth) nanograms per kilogram in humans."

[–] andrewta@lemmy.world 12 points 5 months ago (13 children)

So are they saying nanograms of the stuff per kilograms of the human?

In other words are they saying it's a ratio compared to the weight of the person?

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 12 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Yeah, personally I would say that it's per kg bodyweight.

But I would also do my darndest to try write it, since "ng/kg" is kind of just nonsense. It makes it look like you could divide the grams out of that to get a fixed ratio, which is not correct at all.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

But it is a fixed ratio.
If it was in pounds, metric tons, moles or atomic mass units... It doesn't change the ratio, the actual number.

Would it be acceptable to drop the unit all together?
"Lethal dose is 0.000000012 : 1 (substance : bodyweight)" (I made up the number).
I'm not sure if there is a better way of writing the ratio.

Could a fraction be more applicable?
"lethal dose is 1/600000 of bodyweight"

I'm sure it's written as ng/kg to show the base units are the same, and the rest is just "fiddling" scientific notation

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.de 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

moles

would not work, as they are no mass unit. 1 mol of Botox does not have the same weight as 1 mol of human (If that is defined at all, as organisms are no pure substances).

[–] towerful@programming.dev 3 points 5 months ago

Ah, yes good point

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 months ago

Well, what I meant with that, is that it's semantically important that it's ng of the substance per kg bodyweight.

If it was ng of the substance per kg of the substance, then in proper mathematical physics, the unit would disappear completely.

So, for example:
42000000000 ng of the substance / kg of the substance

Is equivalent to:
42000000000 * 0.000000001 * kg of the substance / kg of the substance

Which means in the end, you just have: 42

As my physics teacher would often say: Is that 42 potatoes or sausages or what is it?
A number without a unit is just devoid of meaning...

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)