h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

International conventions, which have been erroded due to the American's difficulty with having non-exciting numbers, are these ...

A million - 1,000,000
A milliard - 1,000,000,000 (an American billion)
A billion - 1,000,000,000,000 (an American trillion)
A billiard - 1,000,000,000,000,000 (an American quadrillion)
A trillion - 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (an American quintillion)

Both naming systems are actually French, so they are to blame for the confusion.

More info at his site below.

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/large.html

On the other hand, the British adopted the American system many years ago (I think it was in the 70s), so the standard in the English-speaking world is that a billion is 1,000,000,000. Since this entry is written in English, I felt it best to use the English standard.

The words milliard and billiard were never used in English, even when a billion was 1,000,000,000,000. The number 1,000,000,000 was known as a Thousand Million.

I don't know why you let me sign in... you might know I'd only make some stupid joke about Billiard Balls.
No sugar, thanks.

You think that a billion changing on you is bad... try this:

I grew up in the 70's in the states. I was one of the kids who were taught the metric system. I liked it... it made sense, but then the rest of the country gave up on it! Mind you, we weren't taught conversions... we were only taught a minimum of imperial measures like yards/feet/inches, pounds/ounces and gallons/quarts/pints/cups/liquid ounces. And this was just cursory. We were expected to live in a metric world... HA! I'm just happy that cars sold here have to comply with Canadian standards so there's a small kilometer per hour scale on my speedometer... other than that I never see metric. I was taught metric, but I never 'lived' metric. Celsius temperatures have me baffled. I know freezing and boiling but I don't know if 28 degrees is a pleasant day or not. The difference between weighing 75 kilograms and 100 doesn't seem like that much to me. I know how fast 100 kph is since it's close to 60 mph, but I couldn't tell you how many kilometers I travel to work each day. On the other hand I also can't tell you how many teaspoons are in a cup or how many grains make an ounce or how many pecks are in a bushel or furlongs in a chain.

(Oddly enough I do know roughly how long a nanocentury is )

I usually take a billion to mean 1000 million. I'm not really sure whose billion this is, as I've been told various contradictory stories about whether it's the British billion, American billion, standard billion or what?

"I know freezing and boiling but I don't know if 28 degrees is a pleasant day or not"

I have the same problem but the other way around. I've never understood Fahrenheit. And as for a "pleasant day" it depends where you live. I think of 28 degrees C as pretty toasty.......

Do the French, Germans, etc. *actually use* this alternate definition billion or billard and millard?

Can you imagine the potential confusion in science, for example?

Ste

Maybe we could metricise these numbers: kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc....

I know that somewhere around 37 degrees celcius is 98 degrees Ferenhiet...I have a far better grasp of the extremes in celcius than in ferenhiet...the problem comes when I try to relate to the temperatures in between...I know that 0 degrees is freezing...100 is boiling...37 point something is body temperature -273.15 is zero kelvin...and -40 is -40 in both Celceus and Ferinhiet...if only we could eliminate the Ferinhiet scale and rename the celcius scale Kelvin...it's easier to spell and there is no degree mark involved...that would save a lot of energy in writing...and that energy could be subtracted from that needed to remember the changes that would be made...that's where my idea fails...it's just like the food processing industry...according to this industry...

weight is mesured in kg...not Newtons...
mass is also in kilograms...leading to a whole lot of confusion...
The food industry's calorie is really 1000 actual calories...

I really don't like the idea of all of these different measurement systems...although some of the older ones I am able to remember the conversions...oddly...it may be because I have them in my planner...

I think everyone should use the real metric system...with newton and the like...it would make measurements in my physics class so much more meaningful...it would also prevent the hassel that Americans who are International Bachaloriates go through on their IB tests since all of the units are metric...and are virtually meaningless to us...

I can't forget the uverlaps in the different choices of abbriviations either...did you know that the nanometer[1x10^-9 I beleive] has the same abriviation [nm] as the nautical mile ...which is slightly longer than the American mile...that is a huge differance...so every time I see nm I think nanometer...never nautical mile...

Overmind

Sim post...

that's a good idea...it reminds me of a homework assignment where we were told to do that to all sorts of measurements...like days, months, pounds(weight), and of course money...it confused the heck out of all of us...

100oF was chosen because it's human body temperature. Can't remember what 0oF is. But it happened to be off slightly, so body temp = 98oF = 37oC.

21oC is commonly seen as the temperature where people are most comfortable, and I think that's the definition of room temp too. 30oC and 90oF 'feel' the same. I'm English but I've been living here in the States for three years, so I have a feel for both scales. I prefer celcius (btw, "centigrade" is not a word), as you can feel the difference between, say, 7oC and 8oC, or 17oC or 18oC, but you can't tell the difference between 66oF and 67oF, so you just end up thinking "in the 60s F", which is less informative.

Isn't Newton a measure of force?

A Calorie = 1000 calories. Note the capital "c". It's just a convention.

You only use nm on the atomic/molecular scale, so it should be easy to work out the context if bleeding great oil tankers are involved.

I love the metric system. I wish Americans did too, I'd make my life so much easier.

AAAAND. I forgot. Did you know the UK non-metric is different than the US non-metric? A UK gallon in 5/6 of a US gallon, yet a US pint in 5/6 of a UK pint. There's all sort of differences. I discovered this whilst trying to make a curry using a UK website and US measurements. It was SO bland.

Ste

Yes newtons are a measure of force...but, as SuperMoo has atested to in many a post...since the weight W is equal to the force of gravity on your body, mass m, and F=ma or W=mg where g is the acceleration due to gravity near the earth's surface and is aprroxamately 9.8 m/s^2 then the units come out to be

W=(kg)(m/s^2)
and one Newton(N) is equal to one kg*m/s^2 so that W is then in Newtons...

Yea I know that there is a difference between writing Calorie and calorie...just never can remember which is which...speaking of which...did you know the word Calorie comes from the idea that heat was really particles that flowed from one body to another...they were caled Calors...

Actually the Nautical Mile referance was on a National Weather Sevice page...and with me being so used to the nanometer...I was reading about how the radar will pic up fine dust particles on screen within somewhere like 80 nm...and it took me about half of the paragraph to figure out that the units didn't match up...even if they were talking about fine dust...

Fahrenheit:

0 degrees F was chosen as the coldest constant temperature that Mr Fahrenheit could achieve in his laboratory.

96 degrees F (not 100) was chosen as human body temperature. Why 96? Originally he was going to call it 12 but he decided the units would be too big, so we multiplied each unit by 8 giving 96 for the top of the scale.

Of course nowadays we should use a figure of 98.2 degrees F for body temperature.

There's a handy way of remembering what normal temperatures are in Celsius and Fahrenheit:

20 C = 68 F
30 C = 86 F

You just reverse the digits of the F number. In Ireland, these would be considered pretty warm and very hot, when talking about air temperature.

Isn't it so that the regularly spoken about Calorie is in actual fact abbreviated to kCal, which is meant to be kilocalorie, but people are just to lazy to add on the kilo-bit (not computer related in this context) of the word? And because people are too lazy to say the whole thing, they decided to spell it with a capital C instead.

I can't work the Fahrenheit scale either. Being from Sweden, I have grown up in a completely metrical country and also only ever used the Celsius gradiations for temperature. I once knew how to work the Fahrenheit scale, but it was long ago, and I've never needed it, so it's lost in the mist of time.

Swedish uses the million, milliard, billion, billiard, trillion, trilliard increase when starting from six zeros and then adding another three at each step.

Personally, I think people coming up with new names for absurdly large numbers are just wasting time, cause no one will ever see such a number.

Or maybe I should think of a name for a one with googolplex zeros after it. Is Fantallion taken?

French use the proper international methiod. UK only adopted it for government financial statement, however it has slipped into everyday life.

On that link I posted up top there should be a thing about using a standard naming thing.

Have no idea about Fahrenheit, happy enough with kelvins, celsius and centigrade.

Another thing ..

Bytes ?

A kilo byte is 1024 bytes
A mega byte is 1024 kilobytes
Is a Gigabyte 1024 megabytes anymore ? It seems to hae gone back to a thousand

There has always been confusion of the use of Kilo etc with respect to bytes. The computer industry decided to use Kilo to mean 1024 even though it already meant 1000. So KB always meant 1024 bytes. But kilobits per second was a telecommunications term, so it meant thousand bits per second, not 1024 bits per second.

When megabytes were introduced, some people used 1,000,000 bytes, some used 1024 x 1024 bytes while some used 1000 KB = 1000 x 1024 bytes. For example, the "1.44 MB" drives on the original IBM PS/2 were 1440 KB 1.44 x 1000 x 1024. Disk drive manufacturers were particularly anxious to make their drives seem as big as possible, so they tended to use 1 MB = 1 million bytes.

With GB, it is anybody's guess what is meant.

From A471476 (A very thorough article germane to this subject) I quote:


"In information theory the same prefixes are applied to its fundamental unit, the byte (B). However, in a majority of cases of use, 1 MB actually represents 1024·1024 B = 1,048,576 bytes, rather than a strictly accurate 1,000,000 B. Therefore some metric purists called for clear distinction. The result was published in 1998. Now 1024 B are one kibibyte (1 KiB), 10242 B are one mebibyte (1 MiB) and 10243 B are one gibibyte (1 GiB). This well-meant, albeit slightly academic approach, while approved by many standardisation authorities, hasn't yet made it into everyday practice."


CZ

That makes more sence in the orginal article when you can see that it is 1024 to the power 2 and 3 rather than 10242 and 10243 bytes !

It is not a British Billion, or even a U.K. Billion but a European Billion with just the French being different to everybody else.
I have a German bank note issued in the third decade of the 20th. Century which is over-printed "10,000,000,000,000 Marks" and this is re-enforced with the words (translated) "Ten billion marks".
The meaning of the word "Billion" has to obey scientific laws ans not political laws which means that its meaning cannot be changed by mear humans. It is the shortened form of "Bi-million"; that is a million squared which is Ten to the power (six times two) which is equal to Ten to the power twelve. Moving-on from this; a Trillion is a "Tri-million" which is a million cubed, which is Ten to the power (six times three)or Ten to the power eighteen.
There was a time in the twentieth century when we had a Prime Minister who appeared to have delusions that he was God (having attended the London School of Ecconomics) and declared that from that point onwards Ten to the power twelve U.K pounds were equal to Ten to the power nine U.K. pounds! From that moment, the pound began to spiral inwards rather like an artificial satelite in a decaying orbit.
However, as far as radio listening is concerned, whether it is BBC television or BBC wireless; I know that when their presenters use the words "Billion" and "Trillion" they do mean "Ten to the power twelve" and "Ten to the power eighteen" as these are unbreakable scientific laws. The exception to this is when they are referring to the U.K. pound. For this, they use the error introduced by the French which, as with so many things, was compounded by the United States. I expect the same error to be utilized with the U.S. dollar. I am at a loss with the "Euro" since the majority of the countries using it, have always used the true scientific meaning, but the French do have a history of insting that terminology is done their way, especially when the are both wrong and in a minority.
In conclusion, we do not need to "Save the British Billion" as it is not British, but a catholic scientific term which only God can change, whateven terminology you may use for your God.

>>However, as far as radio listening is concerned, whether it is BBC television or BBC wireless; I know that when their presenters use the words "Billion" and "Trillion" they do mean "Ten to the power twelve" and "Ten to the power eighteen" as these are unbreakable scientific laws.

They are not scientific laws. Languages are devised by humans. Almost everybody in the UK, including the BBC, uses billion to mean 10 to the power of nine in all cases. That's what the word means. It may have meant something else in the past, but words do change meaning. When somebody described Newton as a nice man, they meant he was disagreably meticulous. Since a billion means a thousand million, it would be very misleading if the BBC were to use it to mean something else.

A billion is 1,000,000,000,000 in the English system.
The USA uses the old French 1,000,000,000 as a billion.
Since then, the French have changed their billion to be the same as the British Billion which is the same as the German Billion.

Reference: Webster's Dictionary.

The BBC need to get their act together. They have Americanised television with their stupid male/female format on the news and News24 has logos all over the place and scrolling news text. Four times during 2005, when reporting on golf tournaments, the winning putt was ruined because the annoying left hand side red logo was covering the hole. And as for the term "Breaking News" and "Top of the Hour", it's just infantile. And please get some newscasters that have had a life. None of them have any knowledge of science, engineering or technology and some of the questions they ask are crass. Consequently, they never ask the right questions and we never hear the truth.