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Now is a good time to flood Wikipedia with donations. For the first time in my life, i have just donated to them and will do so again. You can do it too for a minimum of €2, no requirement for recurring donations or any nonsense.
Tangential, but I’ve always wondered why in English 10^9 is one billion. 10^6 is one million. Twice as many zeroes should be one billion. Three times as many, one trillion, etc.
Only in English is this weird naming system used and originally only in American English. You can put it in the pile over there with the miles and pounds and other oddities.
Other languages have milliard between million and billion, billiard after billion etc.
Long vs short counting system. Americans use the short system. As a European, long system makes so much more sense! Here’s an interesting video about it: https://youtu.be/C-52AI_ojyQ?si=-TS4BYg-FT0SAeSo
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https://piped.video/C-52AI_ojyQ?si=-TS4BYg-FT0SAeSo
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Miles and pounds came to America from England, but miles were the common system at least as far back as the Romans.
Short form numbers are used throughout the English speaking world and are the international scientific standard.
Why is is that you think that your system of squaring makes more sense than the system of a new name for every third power of ten?
Short form is used in English only and was reluctantly adopted outside of the US since the 'mericans weren’t going to budge. Any science done in other languages uses the more logical form. I’ve done it myself in 3 of them. And it’s weird how I fluently translate between American billion and international milliard or American trillion and international billion. But I’m sure there is going to be a rocket blown up over this at some point.
Why more logical? Billion, prefix bi for 2 is million squared. Trillion, prefix tri for 3 is million cubed. Septillion, prefix sep for 7 is? Honestly, though, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that much. It’s just grating that were being yanked backwards. However slightly. And yes, that pun was intentional.
Sure, the US didn’t come up with the imperial measuring system but everyone else has moved on. Miles were used by the Romans but were they the same miles? Everyone had their own foot… the story about Napoleon being short was simply that he was measured in French feet and they were longer than English feet so he amounted to fewer of them. I guess it’s slightly better now that there is only one set* of archaic pre-enlightenment units in play :shrug:
*having said all that, some of the US measurements don’t quite coincide with the UK ones but I can’t remember any if those details. But it’ll probably kill a other rocket too.
PS I dare you to look up the Swedish mile.
From memory, when I was a kid, it used to be that a billion was 10^12, but I think most of the world changed at some point to adopt the American billion of 10^9.
Edit: wiki article that discuss a little of this
As a kid I was taught numbers like so.
Once you had X amount of X, then it became the next one. 10 ten = 100, 100 hundred = 1000 1000 thousand = 1 million, 1 million million = billion. And so on.
100 hundred is 10,000
Yep - same here. Australia, early 80s. You?
I’m only 29