4 ms·

As topkai22 said, it's to make the author's comparison easy to understand. But this is a chance to mention that ~50 years ago the UK abandoned its old "billion"

by sowbug 7y ago

As topkai22 said, it's to make the author's comparison easy to understand. But this is a chance to mention that ~50 years ago the UK abandoned its old "billion" terminology, which used to be equivalent to a trillion elsewhere (10^12), and adopted the global definition of "billion" as 10^9. I think they called 10^9 a milliard, but I've never seen it in use. For a long time after the change, you'd see English written for an international audience using a more drawn-out version of large numbers (a "million million" for example) sort of the same way we have metric next to imperial these days. That's not what's happening here, but it's interesting.

colejohnson66 7y ago
Fun fact about long scale billion (short scale trillion): it stands for bi-million because it’s a million millions. Trillion is the same with a tri-million being a million billions.
- sowbug 7y ago
  That's cool to know. Vaguely related: I've been studying a little bit of Mandarin recently and have had trouble with their system of describing larger numbers that doesn't follow the Western groups-of-three system. For example, 万 means ten thousand, but it's actually "one of a thing described by a word representing 10^4," and you wouldn't say 十千 which literally translates to "ten of a thing described by a word representing 10^3." It's surprisingly hard to regurgitate the right labels when your brain is used to thinking in terms of 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, etc. They're all different, internally consistent systems, and as far as I can tell nothing makes one better than the rest -- except for one's own familiarity with it.
kgwgk 7y ago
> and adopted the global definition of "billion" What's your definition of global? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_... Edit: I guess you meant global as far as the English language is concerned only, ignoring the equivalent words in other languages. But even that would be wrong, as apparently Australia adopted the American usage after the UK. In any case, it's interesting that the US diverged from the European use following the French (who since then went back to the original meaning of billion).

by sowbug 7y ago

colejohnson66 7y ago

Fun fact about long scale billion (short scale trillion): it stands for bi-million because it’s a million millions. Trillion is the same with a tri-million being a million billions.

sowbug 7y ago
That's cool to know. Vaguely related: I've been studying a little bit of Mandarin recently and have had trouble with their system of describing larger numbers that doesn't follow the Western groups-of-three system. For example, 万 means ten thousand, but it's actually "one of a thing described by a word representing 10^4," and you wouldn't say 十千 which literally translates to "ten of a thing described by a word representing 10^3." It's surprisingly hard to regurgitate the right labels when your brain is used to thinking in terms of 10^3, 10^6, 10^9, etc. They're all different, internally consistent systems, and as far as I can tell nothing makes one better than the rest -- except for one's own familiarity with it.

kgwgk 7y ago

> and adopted the global definition of "billion" What's your definition of global? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_... Edit: I guess you meant global as far as the English language is concerned only, ignoring the equivalent words in other languages. But even that would be wrong, as apparently Australia adopted the American usage after the UK. In any case, it's interesting that the US diverged from the European use following the French (who since then went back to the original meaning of billion).