Message-Id: <9202111901.AA12686@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Date:         Tue, 11 Feb 1992 17:13:20 GMT
Reply-To: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>
Sender: Lojban list <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!LOJBAN>
From: CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu!C.J.Fine>
Subject:      Re: Billions
To: John Cowan <cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "Ivan A Derzhanski" at Feb 11, 92 12:37 pm
Status: RO

Ivan answers me:
>
>
> >  Date:        Tue, 11 Feb 1992 09:17:37 GMT
> >  From: CJ FINE <C.J.Fine@BRADFORD>
> >
> >  (I happen to think that anything outside Mego- to micro- is a worthless
> >  accretion to the metric system, but that is another matter).
>
> I disagree.  Some SI units of measure are too large for practical
> purposes, and consequently one hears about nF (1E-9 F) and pF (1E-12
> F) much more frequently than about F (the unit of capacity), for example.
> I reckon there must be some that are too small for practical purposes,
too.

Point taken. However, I observe that for any particular quantity, only a
certain range of values (perhaps 6 or at most 12 orders) are commonly used.
I have never heard anybody use Mm (megametres), still less larger
multiples; likewise, I have never come across mF (millifarads), meV
(milli-electron volts) Mg (megagrams) or exa-, femto- or atto- anything.
Added to which, the two most common metric systems each take as one of
their fundamental units something which appears to be derived
(centimetre in CGS, kilogram in MKS). All in all the whole thing is a
mess.

>
> >  The only
> >  (possible) problem is in the translation - if you gloss "gigdo"% as
> >  "billion" rather than "Giga-":
>
> You must not do that.  {gigdo} must be glossed as `1E9', or `10^9' in
> LaTeX.  Using words is too confusing, and sooner or later you'll have
> to switch to the exponential notation anyway.

I don't get the 'must', but I agree.

>
> >  [<...>] the
> >  only thing directly conveyed to me by the choice between "quintillion"
> >  and "quadrillion", say, is that the one is bigger than the other <...>]
>
> More precisely, a thousand times bigger, or maybe a million times
> bigger if you acknowledge a thing called "quadrilliard" between them.
> The only thing I know is that a google is 1E100.  How's that in Lojban?

Just my point. I know it is a thousand times bigger, in the same way as
I know that galaxies are thousands of times as far apart as the suns
within them. But it is cognitively meaningless - a spurious precision.
                kolin