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

Makes it hard to work out your BMI...

B

True enough - although my weight is *top secret* (and in kilos) I also still think of myself being 5'4" tall (or short).


az

Aaack, BMI is often just a load of cr*p anyhow, but that's another discussion entirely.


az

I think it was Googolplex. Apparently a word invented by a mathematicians 9-year old son. Or at least so Carl "Billions and billions" Sagan said in a book of his.

The world as far as I know is about 5000 million years old. Which is 5 milliard. And I think milliard should be standard, it means we don't have to invent so many new words. It's
million
milliard
billion
billiard
trillion
trilliard
and so on. More systematic that way.

Milliard was never used in English. It used to be

thousand
million
thousand million
billion
thousand billion
trillion

That's even less new words to invent.

Both Googol and Googolplex were invented by children.

Wish they'd just get on with finishing metrication. For some reason there is an anti-metrication movement in the UK, which is bloody stupid. I can't wait to buy beer in litres.

>> I can't wait to buy beer in litres <<

It'll be sold in 33cl or 50cl glasses, most likely.

There may be a small anti-metrication movement in Britain, but what people object to most is being told that they *have* to use metric over imperial. If people want to use imperial measures, and their customers are happy, why should they be sent to jail?

RF

All the beer bottles and cans in Ireland are metric: either 33 cl or 50 cl, but people still order pints in pubs.

Litre bottles of beer are quite common in Spain. Sold chilled in most corner shops and supermarkets.

az

Because imperial units are ridiculous and need to be gotten rid of, but people are naturally too lazy to do it. Somehow a small fine sounds a lot more likely than people being sent to jail over it.

I'm sure Germans can get their beer in nice litre jugs, would hope British pubs would follow suit.

Gnomon,
"Milliard was never used in English. It used to be
thousand
million
thousand million
billion
thousand billion
trillion"

Erm,
should it not have been:

"billion
thousand billion
MILLION billion
trillion" ?


Orcus,
Sorry for any confusion. I was attempting humour to make the same point that you made with:
"As I've pointed out - it's almost an entirely useless word."
apart from mathematics enthusiasts and footballers' agents.

Plaguesville, no.

Oh.

To elaborate on "Oh."

"http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/expl/ea2.asp
We are already thinking ahead toward the generation-after-next system, a capability able to sustain operations of one hundred teraflops to one petaflop(a million billion floating point operations per second."

So it's not just me, then.

That "million billion" is by someone using the American system of "small billions". A petaflop is 10^15 flops, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 flops. The writer could have said that a petaflop was 1 quadrillion flops, but the readers would not have been any wiser. So he noted that this is equal to 1,000,000 x 1,000,000,000 which is a million times a billion.

In the old British "big billion" system this would have been 1 thousand billion. In the system outlined by Xanatic it would be a billiard.

>>In the system outlined by Xanatic it would be a billiard.<<

And here is me, thinking that billiard is a sophisticated way of saying "playing pool"...

Y.

It's a load of balls, if you ask me.

Though three balls, or 16 balls, is still a few balls short of billiard balls.

Y.

See my Edited Entry on the Googol, A2181548, for a real load of balls.