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It is less intuitive for me as an outsider that a trillion would be a million million millions instead of a billion billions
by s1artibartfast 2y ago
It 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.