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

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The old meaning of billion, the 10**12 one) is the meaning we were taught at school in NZ, and I have always thought of it as the proper, or British one, so I am surprised to discover it *isn't* used in Britain any more! (Nor in NZ, but I thought that was just because NZ is so Americanised these days.)

Was it *ever* used?

As I've pointed out - it's almost an entirely useless word

Plaguesville, I think you misunderstood me there, I was challenging someone to come up with a reasonable use of the OLD billion, not the eminently sensible currently used one

Hi Anhaga!

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. That's American billions (1,000,000,000). These billions have also been used for about the last thirty years in England as well. England has now abandoned the old system of 1 billion = 1 million x 1 million. All newspapers use the American billion now, and so do scientific journals.

But the message seems to be slow to get through to some people.

The Germans still use the big billion (1,000,000,000,000), but the French always used the American billion. So there is really no such thing as a European billion anymore.

A reasonable day-to-day us of the "old billion" - I have 120GB hard disk in my PC at home. That's nearly a billion bits of information.

The old system of million billion trillion made a lot of sense:

(old system)
1 billion = 1 million ^2 ... (bi = 2)
1 trillion = 1 million^3 ... (tri = 3)
1 quadrillion = 1 million^4 ... (quad = 4)

etc.

The new system doesn't make a lot of sense:

1 billion = 1 thousand x 1 thousand^2 (bi = 2)
1 trillion = 1 thousand x 1 thousand^3 (tri = 3)
etc.

But I have to admit that the new (American) system is more useful. The population of the Earth is 6 billion. The age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years. The American defence buget is ... Oh that would require trillions.

The proper term for that would be "Fantastilliarde"...

Y.

"The population of the Earth is 6 billion"

Is that 6,000,000,000?

And half of these are male?

How come I can't find a date, then?

GB, it is estimated that there are about 21 million more Chinese males than Chinese females. That's 21 million men who will have to look for a non-chinese partner. You shouldn't have a problem!

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Do you know if Germans still use the 'big billion' in science and mathematics? I know that lots of Spanish people I know still think in terms of the 'big billion' but again, I don't know if this is only amongst lay people.

It wouldn't make sense that numbers used in technical journals would be different from country to country as this would cause a lot of confusion. Surely there must be some sort of global standard?

az

Yes, the SI prefixes mentioned earlier, kilo (1000), Mega (1 000 000) and Giga (1 000 000 000) etc.

strangely it's the US that tends to buck the convention of using SI units by persisting in using the calorie rather than the joule, the mile instead of the kilometre, gallons rather than litres etc.

Ireland changed over to kph instead of mph for speed limits about four weeks ago. That's everything changed over to metric now. But people still talk about calories here.

In scientific literature is what I meant. It's very annoying to have to convert units from US journals to find out if your results match theirs or not...

People will never stop talking Calories down your local shop I would doubt. I don't doubt that very few know what a Calorie is anyway

(amount of energy required to heat 1 gramme of water by 1 degree celcius at standard temerature a pressure = 1 calorie in case anyone is interested, Calories in food are in fact kilocalories, hence the capital C at the begining)

Just four weeks ago? Noggin tells me that in the UK they still use mph but food displayed in shops must be shown in kilograms. And that weather temperatures are usually shown in both celsius and fahrenheit.

It was a gradual process in Canada. When I was a teenager (thirty years ago!) I remember they changed weather temps to celsius and I adapted to this quite easily - to the point that now fahrenheit temps don't mean anything to me anymore. Later on they showed highway signs in both miles and kilometres (don't know if they still do this). And the last time I was back in Canada - about eight years ago - they had all food products in both metric and imperial weight measures (perhaps by now it is only in kilograms).

Spain (where I live now) is totally metric. Not sure if it was always like this - or at least in the past hundred years or so. Though since the money changed to euros four years ago many people here still think in pesetas.

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Well, personally speaking, I try to think about calories as little as possible.


az

On my one trip to Canada, last summer, there was one sign as we crossed the border from the US which was in both kph and mph. After that, it was kph all the way.

One thing people forget about the metric system is that before it was introduced in Europe we had complete chaos. I have a little set of Engineer's Tables dating from 1873. They give the size of a British Imperial foot, an Austrian foot, a Spanish foot, a German foot and so on. They also mention in passing the system used in France (the metre).

I just checked the side of a 'healthy options' tin of soup that is on my desk, it contains 744 kilojoules. There is NO WAY I'm going to change to counting those rather than kilocalories (176 in the soup), big numbers do not psychologically sit well with trying to lose weight

Don't most people know what the calorie is based on? We did the setting-fire-to-a-peanut experiment where we measured how much it raised the temperature of half a litre of water at GCSE-level science. I haven't eaten a peanut since

k

How about 0.744 Megajoules?

Sounds like enough to put a small rocket into orbit, doesn't it?

Kilojoules??? Never even heard of them! I still can't understand kilocalories, nor do I really want to , but you know . . .

Although I'm quite okay with kilos and kilometres now I find I still measure material (when I make clothes) in feet and inches. I *know* exactly what an inch or half an inch looks like, and can measure these things by eye, but still have yet to grasp what 4cm looks like. For shame.


az

It is hard to change. I think of myself as 76kg in weight and 5 foot 11 inches tall.