Re: Billions

[Chris Handley <cbmvax!uunet!GANDALF.OTAGO.AC.NZ!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!CHandley>]

Colin writes:

>We make more use of the metric system here than in the US, I think,
>so insofar as anybody uses Giga- and Mega-, they are familiar here.
>(I happen to think that anything outside Mego- to micro- is a
>worthless accretion to the metric system, but that is another
>matter). The only (possible) problem is in the translation - if you
>gloss "gigdo" as "billion" rather than "Giga-": but actually,
>thanks to American cultural imperialism ;-) and the fact that
>billion = 1E9 is more useful in the modern world, that ambiguity
>now exists in everyday British life, with most people (including
>the influential newspapers) following what was formerly American
>usage, and those who cannot bring themselves to use the term in
>that way avoiding it altogether.
>
>[On the subject, I have only ever come across phrases like
>"quintillion" in American popular science books - I believe they
>are vacuous, as the only thing directly conveyed to me by the
>choice between "quintillion" and "quadrillion", say, is that the
>one is bigger than the other - since both are in the realm that I
>cannot comfortably hold in my mind, the distinction is nugatory.
>End of rant]
>
The only people who really use very large and very small numbers are
scientists (and the bean counters who try to figure out the US
national debt). However even they rarely use more than 6 or 8
digits, the rest is in exponential notation - Avogadro's number is
about 10^24, some of the isotopes of Helium have a half life of
10^-23 seconds. However, Colin's claim that prefexes outside the
Mega- to micro- range are worthess, is a little specious -
capacitors are routinely measured in picofarads, wavelengths of
light in nanometers, wavelengths of radio waves in GigaHertz and so
on, although I grant that the more extreme prefixes are rarely used
outside the realm of particle physics. However, seeing Lojban has
got the prefixes for these, it would be useful if psuedo-number
words could be made from them, even if only to help future Lojbani
physicists - it would be much easier to say 3 Attons than 3 times
ten to the fifteen.

Chris Handley                                     chandley@otago.ac.nz
Dept of Computer Science                       Ph     (+64) 3-479-8499
University of Otago                           Fax     (+64) 3-479-8577
Dunedin, NZ