I love esoteric measures, for example when working early in my career for an oil company where barrels ruled, I made it my business to know the number of firkins in a hogshead.* Therefore I was piqued by “Coding the Wheel” blogger James Devlin making a point about precision to level of “the last vigintillionth of a yoctometer” (yes, evidently those are real units of measure!).
Fyi, math whiz Landon Curt Noll made a “heroic attempt to put names on hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian numbers” (quoted from this web page on Naming Large Numbers). He provides this utility for getting the English name of any number you enter. I entered 1,000,000,000 and got “one billion” as the result. But then I changed from the American to the European system and Noll’s number-namer spit out “one milliard”! So then I tried 1,000,000,000,000,000 and came up with “one billiard”!! That sent me back for a draft of brew from my firkin (depicted in this video).
Thus fortified, I kept after these mind-muddling measures and verified that this pool-player’s favorite number (billiard) is considered acceptable under the “long scale” (European) branch of the SI (Système International) of units – the modern metric system.
Who knew? (Please forgive my ignorance of European styles, being that I’m a mid-continent dweller of North America. I am learning!)
*See this picture of a 19th century hogshead barrel and learn how it varies in gallons depending on whether it contains beer, wine or tobacco.
#1 by Eric Kvaalen on November 23, 2009 - 3:21 pm
BI-llion was meant to be a million squared, and TRI-llion a million cubed, and so on. But then somebody had to mess it up and start using billion to mean only a thousand million, so now we’re stuck with two incompatible systems.
I use the word milliard for a thousand million because it’s unambiguous. But for a million million, I usually say a million million rather than a billion, since billion is ambiguous.