400 billion systems - UK or US definition?

[Mad Matt]

i stand corrected, and i have no excuse for age or lack thereof, either : )

at school i was always taught the long scale version, but always used the metric for measurements, still can't really picture how long a yard is in my head : )

p.s. but we still do use pounds don't we? i've just had to pay more than i'd ike changing these bloody euros to real money for when i come back home next week : (
first time back in the UK for seven years \o/

Yeah to be fair the UK does a bit of a hodge-podge with metric/imperial. All my 80s/90s schooling was in metric but in my head milk & beer is measured in pints, petrol is measured in litres, mileage is measured in miles per gallon, speed is measured in metres per second or miles per hour, fruit and veg is sold by the pound, people are weighed in stone and measured in feet and inches, anything heavier than a person is weighed in kilograms or metric tonnes, anything lighter than a person is measured in grams, distance is measured interchangeably in centimetres, metres, inches, feet, yards, or miles, but never kilometres.

Yes we still have pounds and pence in the UK (although since the recession, pounds are a bit rarer!).

Welcome back by the way! The weather forecast is exactly the same as when you left seven years ago

 

[Flappers]

It's amazing how something as simple as numbers has translation differences across the world.

I don't understand why we can't keep things simple, and numerical the same.

 

[Helvellyn]

Try being anywhere else in the world and being confronted with gallons, the US and British measure of each is different as well. Use litres like everyone else you neanderthals so questions like 'which bloody gallon do they mean?' can end.

The only point in using litres would be if we got beer by the litre instead of the pint.

 

[Polared]

The only point in using litres would be if we got beer by the litre instead of the pint.

you really, really, really don't want that mate! you'd get it sold by half litres in the pubs, just like over here, and that would mean, LESS BEER in the glass!!! : (

Welcome back by the way! The weather forecast is exactly the same as when you left seven years ago

cheers mate, and all of the above, i know exactly what you mean : )

btw, i left a heck longer than 7 years ago! but, it's nice to see at least one thing hasn't changed : )

 

[Mad Matt]

It sucks that we always bow down to the yanks version of things (no offence intended for any Americans on here). our politicians are spineless yes men.

Nonsense The politicians (of Harold Wilson's era) didn't impose some foreign concept upon grumpy Brits, they adapted the official position to meet the definition the grumpy Brits had been using increasingly for the previous couple of decades.

Language evolves.

It'd be like complaining that we bowed down and used the latin way of doing things by discussing this on a web forum, rather than use some Anglo-Saxon derived word (imported by those foreign Angles & Saxones)

 

[Flappers]

Language evolves.

Agreed, it does evolve over time (take Victorian English to modern day English)... but I would hardly call the American usage of the English language an 'evolution' - it's more of a step backwards.
Removing letters from words, and simplifying them to make it easy to spell, is more of a mockery of the language than anything.

Doughnut.... Donut.
Hardly an evolution, don't you say?

 

[Polared]

Doughnut.... Donut.
Hardly an evolution, don't you say?

doode, LOL, ROTFL, GR8!!!!!!!!!! OMG! you're right! ; )
J/K LR8

 

[Ackoman]

Agreed, it does evolve over time (take Victorian English to modern day English)... but I would hardly call the American usage of the English language an 'evolution' - it's more of a step backwards.
Removing letters from words, and simplifying them to make it easy to spell, is more of a mockery of the language than anything.

Doughnut.... Donut.
Hardly an evolution, don't you say?

I love the way Americans pronounce laboratory - "labatory". How does that work?

 

[Sargon]

This is a testament to just how disjointed the human race is.
If we can't even agree to mathematical standards... then we wonder why alien civilizations haven't openly contacted us.

 

[Mad Matt]

Agreed, it does evolve over time (take Victorian English to modern day English)... but I would hardly call the American usage of the English language an 'evolution' - it's more of a step backwards.
Removing letters from words, and simplifying them to make it easy to spell, is more of a mockery of the language than anything.

Doughnut.... Donut.
Hardly an evolution, don't you say?

I'm not sure that removing superfluous letters from words renders them devolved - Chaucer had a lot of awfully elaborate spelling, and Shakespeare made half of it up

It's not really a question of one system being better than the other. Language isn't defined by a set of experts sat round a table - much that the Académie Française would wish it were. It's defined by usage - what gets used becomes official, what doesn't get used gets dropped.

Official, Oxford English Dictionary, spelling of "realize" has the Z. Yet many Brits will see that as an Americanism, with the English spelling being "realise". In the UK, both are true, both are correct, in common usage the S probably just about wins, but the Z spelling makes far more etymological sense and is the closest we have to an "official" stance.

 

[Sallen]

I've always used the thousand billion definition.

Using the now perhaps defunct billion as a template, what was a trillion, a million million million?

People you need to realize English-speaking countries are not the center of the universe.
Most countries use the word "billion" (their translated equivalents) to refer to a million millions (don't argue with me, go read up on it).

Your use of the word was a fad of the 17th century that somehow stuck and now plagues the nightmares of translators all over the world.

 

[MuthaF Jamal]

I love the way Americans pronounce laboratory - "labatory". How does that work?

It reportedly works great as lavatory in laboratory

 

[Polared]

and now plagues the nightmares of translators all over the world.

sod them! they have it easy, try typesetting a 500 page anual report in spanish and english! oh, and whilst on that subject, don't even get me started about the decimal comma and decal point issue >:- [

 

[Commander Dave]

Lol, wont even mention the hubble telescope, out of focus because a European contractor misread the units as SI units

This is not correct.
Not for Hubble.

It is correct for the Mars Climate Orbiter that had SI (UK & the rest of the world except US, Myanmar, and Liberia) and US (Imperial) units confused for the orbit insertion causing the craft to be lost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

The Hubble Space Telescope issue was down to a factor in the calibration kit that was not detected at the time.
The mirror surface profile is measured using a technique called interferometry which uses reflected light from the surface to guide the profiling machine. This happens in darkness inside the machine and so any stray light can cause an error. There was a paint fleck chipped off the interior of the machine that caused a tiny, tiny amount more light to be reflected from the exposed metal inside than was accounted for in calibration. So the reference they were using was correct but the measurements taken against the reference were fractionally off because no one knew about this tiny bit of extra reflected light.
So the mirror profiling machine went merrily away polishing the mirror to a microscopically incorrect curve. An amazingly precise but nonetheless incorrect curve.
Because the mirror profile was known with exquisite precision, mathematical tools could process the resultant incorrect image and remove the errors allowing images that were almost as good as an uncorrected optic. Then the compensation optics installed on the 'scope in a later mission were able to restore the performance of the instrument to the levels it should have been.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_mirror
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/638187.stm
The BBC article has the information about the paint fleck.

 

[Ackoman]

It reportedly works great as lavatory in laboratory

Maybe I should have said "how does that make any sense?"

 

[Mad Matt]

People you need to realize English-speaking countries are not the center of the universe.
Most countries use the word "billion" (their translated equivalents) to refer to a million millions (don't argue with me, go read up on it).

Your use of the word was a fad of the 17th century that somehow stuck and now plagues the nightmares of translators all over the world.

You are correct here and my earlier assertion that most of the rest of the world uses the thousand million definition was incorrect.

It'd be safer to say that about half the world and the vast bulk of the English speaking world uses the short scale. And yep, the English speaking portion can be remarkably egocentric as I've aptly demonstrated.

Romance-derived languages, and many others, do tend to err on using the long scale.

 

[Commander Dave]

... my earlier assertion that most of the rest of the world uses the thousand million definition was incorrect.

It was not incorrect.
Almost everyone uses the SI and metric systems.
One billion equals one thousand million. 10^9 or 1,000,000,000.
The only countries that do not use this system are the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

 

[Lucas Kell]

Agreed, it does evolve over time (take Victorian English to modern day English)... but I would hardly call the American usage of the English language an 'evolution' - it's more of a step backwards.
Removing letters from words, and simplifying them to make it easy to spell, is more of a mockery of the language than anything.

Doughnut.... Donut.
Hardly an evolution, don't you say?

They both read the same yet one is more efficient. I'm British and proud, but I have no problem with nuking our language to make it more efficient. The whole purpose of language is to communicate. Whatever makes it easier to do that with more people is good in my book.

Also, I hate the word "whom". It's useless. Get rid of it.

 

[Mad Matt]

It was not incorrect.
Almost everyone uses the SI and metric systems.
One billion equals one thousand million. 10^9 or 1,000,000,000.
The only countries that do not use this system are the US, Liberia, and Myanmar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system

No we're not talking about the metric system here, but naming conventions. 10^9 is the same anywhere that uses the metric system, but whether 10^9 is called a billion, or a milliard, or whatever is down to whether their naming convention uses long or short scale.

 

[Sallen]

You are correct here and my earlier assertion that most of the rest of the world uses the thousand million definition was incorrect.

It'd be safer to say that about half the world and the vast bulk of the English speaking world uses the short scale. And yep, the English speaking portion can be remarkably egocentric as I've aptly demonstrated.

Romance-derived languages, and many others, do tend to err on using the long scale.

I love how easy is to exploit the anglophone guilt complex