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Today is the day -- 10/27. Happy HELLAween! My favorite helladay of them all.

How are you celebrating today? Eating 10^27 pieces of cake? Trick-or-treating at 10^27 houses? Advocating for your favorite proposed SI prefix?

A huge step in the right direction! Thanks, Merriam-Webster.

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Thanks to mental_floss for the shoutout!

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Posted by Mental Floss
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Mental Floss
April 16, 2016

How much is a "hella"? We put a team of researchers on the case.

Happy Pi Approximation Day! Shoutout to Archimedes for being the first to prove that 22/7 > pi way back in the 3rd century BC. #GentlemanAndAScholar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_22/7_exceeds_%CF%80

Proof that 22/7 exceeds π - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Proofs of the famous mathematical result that the rational number 22/7 is greater than π (pi) date back to antiquity. One of these proofs, more recently developed but requiring only elementary techniques from calculus, has attracted attention in modern mathematics due to its mathematical elegance an…
en.wikipedia.org

For those of us on the west coast of the U.S., it is currently 3/14/15, 9:26pm. This is the closest the date has ever been to pi (=3.1415926...) in the last century. Enjoy the moment, and I'll see you all back here in 100 years!

Shoutout to Taylor Swift for acknowledging "the fella over there with the hella good hair." Keep the "hella" torch lit, my friend.

PS. There's a Blank Space in the list of SI prefixes, can you help us write "hella" in?

A major storm is pounding Northern California today -- the #HellaStorm, as Twitter users are calling it. Right on, NorCal tweeters!

Fun fact: If one "storm" is defined as a volume unit equivalent to the volume taken up by covering half of California's surface area up to a height of 10km (roughly the altitude of the "top" of a storm), you could only fit about 20 terastorms within the entire universe. As much as I love the hashtag #HellaStorm, I think we can all agree that we're going to need about a quadrillion more universes before we get to that point.

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/…/Stormageddon-Rainpocalypse-Hell…

"HellaStorm:" Californians Make Light of Severe Weather
With the largest rainstorm hitting the Bay Area in five years on Thursday, drought-weary Californians both took heed of warnings to stay off the roads, while also taking time to poke fun at all the storm hype.
nbcbayarea.com

Today, 10/27, is the official day to celebrate the prefix for 10^27: hella! So a very happy Hellaween to you and yours!

How many different hellaunits can you use in your daily conversation today?

What did the universe look like one hundred millionth of an inverse-hellasecond after coming into existence? Researchers at Stanford may have figured it out: On Monday, a team led by Professor Chao-Lin Kuo announced they had made the first direct observation of gravitational waves, offering convincing evidence for cosmological inflation. Go Stanford!

(This is probably old news to you by now - but final exams kept me from sharing earlier. Enjoy!)

http://news.stanford.edu/…/physics-cosmic-inflation-031714.…

First direct evidence of cosmic inflation supports origin theory of the universe
The detection of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe came to be. The discovery, made in part by Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, supports the theoretical work of Stanford's Andrei Linde.
news.stanford.edu

For those of you with web subscriptions to Wall Street Journal, you check out this recent article on how big data is inching towards the hellabyte metric. Once we do cross the threshold into 10^27 territory, will we begin to see a renewed push to officially designate hella?

http://blogs.wsj.com/…/big-data-headed-for-hellabyte-metri…/

Big Data Headed For ‘Hellabyte’ Metric, Says Andrew McAfee
The explosion of digital data is threatening to leave the computer science world without a way to properly classify large volumes of information, said MIT researcher Andrew McAfee.
blogs.wsj.com

Great news out of Oak Ridge this morning: http://www.theonion.com/…/nabisco-snack-physicists-develop…/

Nabisco Snack Physicists Develop Highly Unstable Quadriscuits
OAK RIDGE, TN—Snack physicists at Nabisco Labs announced Friday the first successful synthesis of a Quadriscuit cracker, a salty treat long postulated by the theoretical models of food scientists but never confirmed by experiment until now.
theonion.com