Billions

[Ivan A Derzhanski <cbmvax!uunet!COGSCI.ED.AC.UK!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!iad>]

>  Date:        Tue, 11 Feb 1992 09:17:37 GMT
>  From: CJ FINE <C.J.Fine@BRADFORD>
>
>  (I happen to think that anything outside Mego- to micro- is a worthless
>  accretion to the metric system, but that is another matter).

I disagree.  Some SI units of measure are too large for practical
purposes, and consequently one hears about nF (1E-9 F) and pF (1E-12
F) much more frequently than about F (the unit of capacity), for example.
I reckon there must be some that are too small for practical purposes, too.

>  The only
>  (possible) problem is in the translation - if you gloss "gigdo"% as
>  "billion" rather than "Giga-":

You must not do that.  {gigdo} must be glossed as `1E9', or `109' in
LaTeX.  Using words is too confusing, and sooner or later you'll have
to switch to the exponential notation anyway.

>  [<...>] the
>  only thing directly conveyed to me by the choice between "quintillion"
>  and "quadrillion", say, is that the one is bigger than the other <...>]

More precisely, a thousand times bigger, or maybe a million times
bigger if you acknowledge a thing called "quadrilliard" between them.
The only thing I know is that a google is 1E100.  How's that in Lojban?

Ivan