Comments on: How Much Is A “Billion”?

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:55:47 +0000

There is a semi-serious petition to get ‘hella-’ designated as the SI prefix for 10^27

And 10^30 should be dubbed “valotta-” … then 10^810 = 10^27 * 10^30 would be a “hellavalotta”…

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:34:17 +0000

Once you reach 10^24 the agreed SI prefixes end. with yotta- being the top of the tree so far.

There is a semi-serious petition to get ‘hella-’ designated as the SI prefix for 10^27, (see the New Scientist for instance.

There’s also a less serious (!) counter-petition for establishing the next group of prefixes as “harpo-”, “chico-”, “groucho-” and “zeppo-”.

The Sun’s output could be measured in ‘hellawatts’, and the distance between very remote stars measured in “zeppo-metres”

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:47:39 +0000

It’s easier to say “one billion” than “one thousand million”.

Though “thousand million” is more common, the number does have a name in the “long” (“British”) system: milliard. However, I’ve never actually heard of anyone using the long system…

I’m a software developer amongst other things and we obviously make use of the same prefixes, but, once again, the meanings are slippery. In computing terms, a “terabyte” could mean either 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes!

AFAIK, “terabyte” in computing terms always means the latter (though the officially-sanctioned term for that is “tebibyte”, TiB), except for disk capacity, where it means 1,024,000,000,000 bytes.

By: cmdweb

cmdweb — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:52:31 +0000

I appreciate there has been confusion in the past but in the UK now, it’s generally accepted that one billion is one thousand million is 1,000,000,000.

By: Simon Kewin

Simon Kewin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 07:28:32 +0000

Hi Robyn,

Thanks for the extra information! I deliberately avoided talking about the powers of 10 as I thought it might make matters less clear, but I take your point.

The prefixes you describe might make for an interesting further post. I’m a software developer amongst other things and we obviously make use of the same prefixes, but, once again, the meanings are slippery. In computing terms, a “terabyte” could mean either 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes!

Incidentally, isn’t the prefix giga- for 10^9?