Number words in English

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Author	Topic: Number words in English
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 16:00 Profile Homepage #25 Also, you can express much larger number before running out of words. An octillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Unless I miscounted. In the American system, it is only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 16:43 Profile Homepage #26 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: In the same way that feet make more sense than meters? :P Feet are hardly even the worst offenders, too, as anyone knows who has ever wondered how many tablespoons/ounces/cups there are in a quart/pint/gallon. Unless they bake regularly or drink lots of different kinds of alcohol in different containers, Americans don't even know. However, "one hundred thousand million" seems excessive compared to "one hundred billion," and since one is unlikely to use anything above 10^15 very often, the ability to express 10^30 easily is less significant than the ability to express more reasonable numbers concisely. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Sturg Master Member # 4614	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 18:27 Profile Homepage #27 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: Aside from the fact that I don't recognize the language (C?), C++. Interesting Java program, though. quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: Also, you can express much larger number before running out of words. An octillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Unless I miscounted. In the American system, it is only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Only. :P -------------------- -ben4808 Posts: 3360 \| Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 18:34 Profile Homepage #28 It's relative. Kel, if you were using the other system, you would say "one hundred milliard(s)", not "one hundred thousand million". The length is the same. :P Does "million" have a plural, by the way? "Several milliard" sounds incorrect, but I've heard both "millions upon millions" and "five million dollars". Does it depend on whether there is a unit involved (eg. dollars)? -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Thuryl ...b10010b... Member # 869	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 18:56 Profile Homepage #29 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: Kel, if you were using the other system, you would say "one hundred milliard(s)", not "one hundred thousand million". The length is the same. :P I'm pretty sure that hardly anyone actually uses the word "milliard" any more, even in countries that use the larger value for a billion. :P quote: Does "million" have a plural, by the way? "Several milliard" sounds incorrect, but I've heard both "millions upon millions" and "five million dollars". Does it depend on whether there is a unit involved (eg. dollars)? That's just a feature of English numbers in general, and it doesn't depend on whether there's a unit. You don't say "five hundreds dollars" either, you say "five hundred dollars". In general, if there's a specific number before "hundred" or "thousand" or "million" or whatever, you use the singular. Thus, five thousand, two hundred, $381 million, and so on. If the number you're referring to is a few million but you don't want to specify exactly how large it is, you can just say "millions". So yes, "million" has a plural, and it's "millions", but 5,000,000 is five million, not five millions (because it's a single number, not five groups of one million). "Several million" is perfectly okay, although you'd generally say "many millions" rather than "many million". Don't ask me why "many" works differently in this case; it just does. Oh, and just to complicate things further, you can say "tens of millions" to refer to an unspecified number from 20-99 million or "hundreds of millions" to refer to an unspecified number from 200-999 million, although just plain "millions" is perfectly acceptable for either of these as well. So five hundred million dollars could be referred to as "five hundred million", "hundreds of millions" or just "millions", although it wouldn't be referred to as "tens of millions". [ Wednesday, November 23, 2005 19:13: Message edited by: Thuryl ] -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 \| Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 19:14 Profile Homepage #30 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: Kel, if you were using the other system, you would say "one hundred milliard(s)", not "one hundred thousand million". The length is the same. :P Odd. Re-reading, now, I notice that Alorael wrote the same thing as I had once read, that "milliard" meant 10^6, "million" 10^9, and "billion" 10^15, according to the British system. However, I notice that somewhere after that, Aran said something rather different, that "milliard" simply intercedes between a million and a billion. Evidently I had things backwards. It should be noted that every source I've found for "milliard" also indicates that "thousand million" is completely acceptable and interchangeable, so one could very well say "one hundred thousand million" according to the long scale. Also, if one needed to refer to 10^15, I'm not sure I could take a person seriously who said "billiard" and meant a large number. [ Wednesday, November 23, 2005 19:19: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Thuryl ...b10010b... Member # 869	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 19:28 Profile Homepage #31 quote: Originally written by Kelandon: Also, if one needed to refer to 10^15, I'm not sure I could take a person seriously who said "billiard" and meant a large number. I'm aware that everyone was probably thinking that already, but did you really have to say it? Now I can't stop giggling. -------------------- The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure! Posts: 9973 \| Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
Or else o'erleap. Law Bringer Member # 335	written Wednesday, November 23 2005 21:26 Profile Homepage #32 I brought up this number issue with specific reference to billiards with my whole family gathered for Thanksgiving (or pre-Thanksgiving, actually). The response really let me know that none of us were adopted. Or maybe that nurture can overpower nature. But that's another argument. For further fragments! If I said that -iard came before -ion, I mistyped. -iard is the larger value. For saving words, I suggest using scientific notation in speech as well as in writing. When you start throwing around quadrillions you might as well just give powers of ten. They're equally inconceivable. —Alorael, who is still confused. A German friend learning English a few years ago was baffled by the lack of milliard. Is that or isn't that a common word in German? Posts: 14579 \| Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
*i The Establishment Member # 6	written Thursday, November 24 2005 08:45 Profile #33 Pounds per square inch (psi) are probably one of the worst English units: psi = lbf/in^s lbf = 32.2 lbm-ft/s^2 therefore: psi = 32.2 lbm-ft/s^2/in^2 We all love the British system. -------------------- Your flower power is no match for my glower power! Posts: 3726 \| Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Thursday, November 24 2005 08:50 Profile Homepage #34 It is. Consistently, a x-illiard is a thousand times an x-illion, and an (x+1)-illion is a million times an x-illion. --- I didn't want to start a new thread, and since I've already posted the for-loop mishap here earlier, this is probably the best place to put this. So, I work at some place - a uni to be exact, and the tech center of a uni to be more exact. And they have all these webservers to host the sites of the various faculties. Kay? So one day, one of the web admins notes there is something odd with one of the servers. It regularly has awful overloads and immense response times. Conclusion: Something that runs on it is somehow taking up more resources than it should; most likely a faulty PHP script with some kind of endless loop, etc. There is one command on the webserver that returns a status page with all recently requested pages, and the process id's these were assigned. There is another command in Unix (which the webserver runs on, obviously), which is called top, that returns the current load on the server and which processes are running on it, and how much cpu time they're taking. So they need to find the process id of a process that's causing a peak, and look it up in the status page to see what site was requested. Et voila, they have the cause of the problem. They can't predict when the peak is going to happen, though, and when it does, they have only a few seconds to look it up. So what this admin does is this: He makes a cronjob that saves the status page every minute, and he makes a shellscript that executes the top command every 10 seconds, saving it to a file. This runs for a few weeks and collects data that a human being could never read through in a year. So what they want is a nifty PHP program that gets the data from the archived logfiles they are building, and enters it into a MySQL database, conveniently indexing it and making it search- and sortable. This is where I get in. I spend about a month making this script. One for the status pages (parsing the HTML page, which is very close to what I'm doing with the Spiderweb Statistics, so that was fairly easy). And one for the text file. It takes a while to get it to work right. -- One evening, it's suddenly done. I can enter data into the MySQL database, and display it in a convenient format with another program. Heureka. Now, I take the process log of a day on which the server has had particularly bad peaks. I read the "top" log into the database. I then find the peak and take the status pages perhaps 5 minutes in either direction from that point, and read them into the database as well. Almost done. -- I see this one process that is running for well over ten hours. It's blocking up the entire server. So I look it up in the other table and find... it's missing! There's no web request associated with it! Exasperated, I go back to the status files to see if I got the correct time frame. Looking a bit more closely, I see this: quote: status.991.html - 11:56:04 status.992.html - 11:57:03 status.993.html - 11:59:03 status.994.html - 12:00:04 Curiously enough, the missing process was logged at 11:57:45. Which places it neatly within the missing minute. -- I don't know what's the matter, yet. But I have a suspicion. You know how the server is badly overloaded whenever these peaks occur? And how building the status page itself is a process that takes the server some time? And how it would be entirely possible that the server cannot display its status at peak times because it is too overloaded? -- Of course, it is possible to give the status process a high priority, ensuring it gets done first. It apparently didn't occur to that admin. Result: About two months of data are useless, and a program a spent a month to develop has no data to work with. At least I didn't get the blame. Yet. -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Thursday, November 24 2005 09:51 Profile Homepage #35 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: Heureka. This now makes me wonder why the rough breathing (i.e. the H) has been dropped in every other transliteration of this word I've seen. Maybe it's an American thing — we have cities named Eureka. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Thursday, November 24 2005 10:10 Profile Homepage #36 Oh right. I'd have spelled it Eureka too if I'd been less absent-minded; that is the English spelling after all. :P Does it have an H in its original language (Greek, presumably?) I have a hunch you'd know. ;) -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Thursday, November 24 2005 11:41 Profile Homepage #37 It had an H in classical Attic Greek, but the H's dropped out somewhere along the way, so it doesn't have one in the Demotic Greek spoken today. But the Attic version is usually the one that people cite. -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Thursday, November 24 2005 21:55 Profile Homepage #38 quote: Originally written by Kelandon: It had an H in classical Attic Greek, but the H's dropped out somewhere along the way, so it doesn't have one in the Demotic Greek spoken today. But the Attic version is usually the one that people cite. Since the word probably gained such fame thanks to Archimedes, who spoke the latter? -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Kelandon Off With Their Heads Member # 4045	written Thursday, November 24 2005 22:08 Profile Homepage #39 Exactly. Well, strictly speaking, he spoke Koine, I believe, but it was much the same. [ Thursday, November 24, 2005 22:09: Message edited by: Kelandon ] -------------------- Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens. Smoo: Get ready to face the walls! Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr. Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever Posts: 7968 \| Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Thursday, November 24 2005 23:01 Profile Homepage #40 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: At least I didn't get the blame. Yet. Hahaha. Now he's accusing me of messing with the files he gave me. :rolleyes: And geez is he pissed. -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Student of Trinity Electric Sheep One Member # 3431	written Friday, November 25 2005 10:21 Profile #41 I believe that when the ancient Romans ran into similar problems with their abacus networks, they would shake their heads and repeat, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Perhaps you can try this on your boss. -------------------- We're not doing cool. We're doing pretty. Posts: 3335 \| Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Thursday, December 1 2005 04:13 Profile Homepage #42 While Thuryl is right in his implication that for-loops are not the ultimate in the art of programming, and there are situations where another alternative is more effective, I believe this particular author has yet to discover its value: Uh, yeah. Doubly pointless, you might realize - not only a while instead of a for, but a badly used while too! :rolleyes: Edit: hahaha. This was part of a "Prisoner's Dilemma" program, where one Java class was the game, and other Java classes were virtual "players" who were informed of the last move and queried for the next one. Turns out the programmers shared work. One made the game, and treated "true" as betrayal, and "false" as cooperation, the other made the algorithms and treated "false" as betrayal. Which led to some interesting results, predictably. :P [ Thursday, December 01, 2005 05:08: Message edited by: Saavedro ] -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Sturg Master Member # 4614	written Thursday, December 1 2005 19:58 Profile Homepage #43 quote: Originally written by Saavedro: FYT :P -------------------- -ben4808 Posts: 3360 \| Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00
Arancaytar Law Bringer Member # 2984	written Friday, December 2 2005 01:54 Profile Homepage #44 Admittedly, your version does use a for loop rather than a while one. :P http://www.thedailywtf.com is also an interesting site. -------------------- Encyclopaedia Ermariana • Forum Archives • Forum Statistics • RSS [Topic / Forum] My Blog • Polaris • I eat novels for breakfast. Polaris is dead, long live Polaris. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Posts: 8752 \| Registered: Wednesday, May 14 2003 07:00
Schrodinger FAQSELF Member # 3	written Friday, December 2 2005 08:42 Profile #45 quote: Originally written by NaNoWriMo: [QB]Wasn't the Hubble telescope built with a design error because of the billion/million thing? Or was it a conversion error from centimeters to inches? Hubble had an imperfect lens. Mars Climate Orbiter had the wrong units conversion. -------------------- A few cats short of a kitten pot pie... Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. Check out a great source for information on Avernum 2, Nethergate, and Subterra: Zeviz's page. Finally, there's my Geneforge FAQ, Geneforge 2 FAQ, and Geneforge 3 FAQ. Posts: 2831 \| Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Sturg Master Member # 4614	written Friday, December 2 2005 12:23 Profile Homepage #46 No, no, Hubble's lens was perfect for the way they built it, but the way they built it was a little off of the way it was supposed to be built, a problem easily fixed by some secondary prism. -------------------- -ben4808 Posts: 3360 \| Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00
Or else o'erleap. Law Bringer Member # 335	written Friday, December 2 2005 13:07 Profile Homepage #47 The problem was a flawed mirror, which was produced within the expected precision of the calibration. Unfortunately, the calibration was wrong. Easily fixed is a relative term when it involves delicate instruments in space. —Alorael, who doesn't understand why the Hubble Telescope is in high atmospheric orbit and not a higher orbit. Was there a good reason to establish it in a position that guarantees drag? Posts: 14579 \| Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Sturg Master Member # 4614	written Friday, December 2 2005 14:43 Profile Homepage #48 Accessibility? -------------------- -ben4808 Posts: 3360 \| Registered: Friday, June 25 2004 07:00