Most people can’t handle dealing with million/billion/… numbers, which leads to mistakes like “Elon Musk has 600 billion dollars, he could give every person on Earth a million dollars and still be a billionaire”.

Doing that with scientific notation would be clearer:
600 billion dollars=6e11
divided by 1 million dollars per person (1e6)

(6/1)e(11-6)=6e5=600 000 people Elon can give money to before running out (and that’s if we assume he has that much in cash and not assets and stuff)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Hmmh. I mean your original calculation should have worked as well, it was just a bit complicated so mistakes happen. I’m still more happy with what I proposed. It’s the same thing as engineering notation. Which is scientific notation, just skip the odd exponents, that’s overly complicated and a completely unnecessary extra step. The exponent notation will deal nicely with this anyway. 600 billions is 600e9 (instead of 6e11) it’s the same number just that nobody has a clue what 10^11 is and everyone knows how many zeroes after a billion. So you skip all unnecessary conversions and just copy the number. It’s 600e9/8e9 for the old example, which is 75e0 = 75. Or 600e9/1e6 in the new example, which is 600/1 e (9-6) = 600e3. You also immediately know it’s 600k.

    Engineers use it because it’s really useful for real-world numbers. Also why it’s in the metric system. And the less conversions and operations, the less mistakes.