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Thanks for posting this. I recognized the currency symbol but was confused by the "L".
by hoistbypetard 2y ago
Thanks for posting this. I recognized the currency symbol but was confused by the "L".
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoThe Indian numbering system marks odd power of ten, i.e. 10 ^ {1, 3, 5, 7}. Unit, thousand, lakh, crore [1]. Ours, on the other hand, does it mod 3, e.g. 10 ^ {1, 3, 6, 9}. Thousands, millions, billions, et cetera. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
- eru 2y ago> Ours, on the other hand, does it mod 3, e.g. 10 ^ {1, 3, 6, 9}. Thousands, millions, billions, et cetera. To make matters more confusing, for American English it goes millions, billions, trillions. For British English it used to go millions, milliards, billions, billiards, trillions, trilliards. (That 'long scale' is still the way German used to work ten years ago. No clue if it changed in the meantime.)
- andreareina 2y agoI still mourn the long scale. A billion is obviously a million millions.
- SushiHippie 2y agoThanks! In germany we use the long scale, and this is the first time it clicks. "Eine Billion" is Million² bi -> 2 "Eine Billiarde" is 1000 * Million² "Eine Trillion" is million³ tri -> 3 "Eine Trilliarde" is 1000 * Million³ And so on Yes I knew what a million, milliard, billion, billiarde and so on are, but it never made click that the long scale makes so much sense.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoI feel like at that point, I would rather just use scientific notation (10^x). I also like the easy suffix for thousand (k), million (M), billion (B), trillion (T), quadrillion (Q) for written conversation. $10B revenue, 5k liters, 300M people, etc.
- eru 2y agoYour 'suffixes' are a hodge-podge. Might as well stick with SI prefixes (like you are doing with the 'k' already?)
- lotsofpulp 2y agoIt isn’t consistent, but a lot more people can fluently read “B” for billion rather than “G” giga and understand 10^9. The SI prefix “k” is sufficiently used that it is understood.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoIt is less intuitive for me as an outsider that a trillion would be a million million millions instead of a billion billions
- eru 2y agoMaybe, but either way is relatively quickly to learn by rote for the few orders of magnitude that come up in 'daily life'. For anything bigger, you'd use 'scientific' notation anyway.
- Dylan16807 2y agoYou can make an argument for that, but neither system does that so it's not very relevant to the choice. I think an exponential system would do better to have a different naming scheme.
- eru 2y agoYes, and something like scientific notation is used fairly often even in lay contexts. Eg it's common to read sentences like the following in popular science texts: 'ACME produces one quintillion widgets per year, that's a one followed eighteen zeroes.' The second half is basically scientific notation, but written out.
- Lio 2y agoHaven't we given up on our scale in the UK to match the US system? i.e. the milliard was replaced with the US billion.
- Lalabadie 2y agoAnecdotally, a milliard in French is a billion in English.