Try Petabytes!

Wow! People for the Eating of Tasty Animals (PETA) has a power of 10 named after them? Who knew?

Sure, you can look up all that information in the PETAfile. Just don't get caught.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Check that. Things change.

Wikipedia: Long and short scales

The Systeme International prefixes (Wikipedia) mean what they mean and aren't part of this short/long scale nonsense.

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

Necromancy!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Metric/Standard conversion screw-ups made us lose a Mars probe.

Standard to 'merkin you mean

Nyah, nyah, our trillion is a million times larger than your trillion.
It's funny how, in a country that seems awfully facinated about everything big, your numbers are smaller than ours.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

The American naming seems to follow a logical pattern. 1000 times one thousand = one million, one thousand times a million is a billion, 1000 times a billion is a trillion, 1000 times a trillion is a quadrilion = 10E15.
Are you saying a million times a million is called a billion in Austraila? A billion times a billion 10E24 is called a trillion in Austraila? A trillion times a trillion is called a quadrillion = 10E48 in Austraila? That is also a logical pattern. Neil

American scheme: XXillion = 10^3*(XX+1)
European scheme: XXillion = 10^6*XX = million^XX

European scheme, Danish supplemental:
XXillion = 10^6*XX
XXilliard = 10^6*XX+3 = XXillion*1000

Where XX is a contracted form of the number in bastardized latin.

The american scheme is consistent but not really logical.
Calling it a billion because you started with a thousand and then multipled that with a thousand two times seems like an off-by-one error to me.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

Swedish also uses the -illion, illiard scheme (well, we spell it -iljon, -iljard), and the American convention annoys me no end.

The reasonable solution, of course, is using exponential notation or SI prefixes.

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The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauve-y shade of pinky russet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers

also from wiki-

That doesn't sound right.

Thinking as I type, I get:
Our trillion = 1000 times our Billion = 1E12
Your trillion (if I understand it right) = Your Billion times your Billion = 1E12 * 1E12 = 1E24.

So your Trillion is our trillion squared. A trillion times as big, by our scale. A billion times by yours.

Seems like the long scale trillion ceases to be a very useful number, even for national budgets.

I probably got something wrong, but on this board I rest assured of being corrected if I did!

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

You don't understand right. A long-scale trillion is (million)³, that is 10¹⁸, so "only" a million times larger than the short-scale one.

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The other Shaltanac's joopleberry shrub is always a more mauve-y shade of pinky russet

I don't understand why they mention the metric system. There is no connection between the adoption of metric units and the definition of billion, as far as I know.

- Anglo-Saxon billion = second group of three decimals after the thousand. In other words 1,000 is a thousand, therefore 1,000,000,000 is a billion. Has 2 x 3 + 3 = 9 decimals.

- Continental billion = a million squared (1,000,000 x 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000); has 2 x 6 = 12 decimals.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

They were just saying that it was the metrication board who proposed the name. I has nothing to do with metrics.

Thanks. But now it's no more logical than the 'Murican way. Just incrementing by 1E6 each time instead of 1E3.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Except we start by counting the second million as two, you start by counting the third thousand as two.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.