Scientific notation for money.
October 3, 2008 by dberenstein
Where I was born, a billion was 
, this is, a million millions. However, when I moved to the USA, I learned that a billion should be 
, while a trillion should be . But in the long notation a trillion is 
: a million billions. You can imagine that this is very confusing, especially when talking about money. If you want to get confused, read the wikipedia. This is why I propose that we do away with all those phony numbers when we talk about money and use scientific notation instead.
Here are the advantages: people already should know the prefixes from playing with their computers, school and all the cool sounding words out there that can make most people drool if you just write enough of them: nanotechnology, Megastore, Kilogram of chocolate, gigabyte, microscopic. And seeing as this is scientific, there are no disadvantages at all.
Having established this scientific money, you shouldn’t say a thousand dollars anymore, but a kilodollar instead. Also, in accordance with scientific notation, the denomination should be written at the end rather than at the beginning, I mean, what were people thinking? Geez. So here are the new values of money so that you can get comfortable with them:
You can still buy candy for this.
One Kilo-dollar: a new computer.
One Mega-dollar: a house in California (need to think local here).
One Giga-dollar: what many companies wish they were worth.
One Tera-dollar: The approximate size of the bailout.
One Peta-dollar: all the money in the world? How should I know?
Here are some other fun facts: you can buy a hard drive of one Terabyte for about a kilodollar and that is an expensive Terabyte. That means that it costs one nanodollar to store one byte of information. The cost to store one song from iTunes and to reproduce it is in the one to four millidollar regime. Remember that a song in compressed format takes about 4MB worth of data space. So, the other 989
are markup. Of course, if you want to sound generous you can give people a gift of seven hundred and fifity million nanodollars in the form of a cup of espresso, and if you want to make the bailout more palatable to people, you should state that it is only zero point seven Tera Dollars. This way people would not feel threatened by such a number, seeing a zero point seven is not that menacing at all. It is not even bigger than one for crying out loud!
Also, if you want to feel rich, convert a few dollars to other
hyperinflated currencies. Here is a nice
picture of one such bank note. If you own a couple of them, you only own a few Tera dinars, but you can feel like a billionaire.
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Still, there is the issue of Kilo in scientific notation, and Kilo used with reference to computers. For that, I propose you follow this reference chart.
http://xkcd.com/394/
1 terabyte is actually closer to a hectodollar than a kilodollar: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274
regarding kilo in computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
If you use proper prefixes, there is no confusion.
I’m totally in favour of that since I’ve been confused about the ‘billions’ too on several instances. However, I would appreciate it even more if North America would start using the international system of units, feels like living on the backside of the universe. Since I presently once again have the doubtful pleasure of writing a proposal for a European funding organization, can you imagine what problems it causes that they want the thing on A4 paper, two hole punched?
The proper manipulation of public monetary perception is not elucidation, it is obfuscation. Entirely ablate decimal currencies. Return to Roman origins and carefully unusable English units: farthing, half-groat, haypenny, penny, thrupenny bit, groat, sixpence, shilling, two bob bit (florin), half crown, crown, ten bob note, pound note, and five pound note. Add the guinea just for fun.
Congresscritters would not $700 gigabuck loot the US Treasury until they got their 20% commission. First stage bailout is now $135 GB kickbacks plus $700 GB base and all is well. $100 GB is already “loaned”. That leaves $2000 GB to go (Official Truth) or $5000 GB to go (real world).
It is always a good time to buy ammo. In the post-collapse world .22 rim fire ammo will be the ultimate pocket change. Change you can believe in!
I love all this additional information. Now I can ask the following silly question to my students:
How many kibbehs can you buy for a kibidollar?
Also, the name mebi sounds like something you should be able to find in a japanese restaurant in the sushi category.
Money is much like force in physics.
Just wanted to add the information that our spam filter is now working non stop, the intertubes seem to get very excited by the title of this post.
When I heard that Zimbabwe suffer from hyperinflation and the central bank keep on issuing notes with more and more zeros. I think their economic officials should learn QFT and renormalize the inflaton.
I grew up in a place (the USA, to be precise) where billion means 10^9, and so that seems natural to me. I’ve had Europeans explain to me numerous times how going by multiples of 10^6 makes so much more sense than going by multiples of 10^3, but starting at 10^6. This may indeed be true. But I think there are reasons in practice why SI prefixes, for example, go by multiples of 10^3–having units jump up by a factor of a million is a lot in practice. And as long as we have kilo, mega, giga, tera, etc., we might as well have them line up with the names of the corresponding numbers.
And I think that the British reporters are encumbered by having to say “thousands of millions,” though they don’t seem to mind. 🙂
On the other hand, going by steps of 10^3 means that you need a lot more prefixes and science continues to push the boundaries of the very large and the very small. Hence the steady coinage of new prefixes to keep up with the advances of science.
As for money, since most reporting is local or (at most) national, most people who listen will not be any more confused than they would have been anyway. I fear that the number of people who remember what a “billion” is defined to be wherever they happen to live must greatly exceed the number who remember how scientific notation works.
Re $ for memory: What gets on my nerves: Discussing my quota with computer administrators and thinking about the ratio of our salaries for the few minutes of that discussion compared to the price of harddisk space we are arguing about.
BTW it should be possible to turn of the shadows and the borders of the images that contain the LaTeX formulas in the css that contains the layout of the blog. At least to me that would make the text flow more natural.
Hi Robert:
I don’t have direct access to the css of the blog: one of the perils of having it hosted for free. I’ll try to look for a workaround and to see if there is something I can do. I don’t like the shadows either.
I don’t know about wordpress. But at blogspot.com they let you modify the “html template”. There somewhere hidden in pages and pages of html it says sowewhere what image elements are supposed to look like (ie border=… etc).