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)
Metric system and SI Prefixes anyone?!?? Musk has 600 G$ we have 8 Gppl. 600G$/8Gppl = 75$/p
Also seems to give the correct answer, in contrast to your wrong 7500$.
I feel this issue has long been solved (since the French revolution). Except in one big country who is allergic to proper maths and engineering… (plus Liberia and Myanmar)
That’s probably better, yeah. (also, I fixed my mistake, thanks for pointing it out)
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.
TIL. I like this
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=60e10 divided by 8 billion people=8e7
(60/8)e(10-7)=7.5e3=7500 dollars
Apparently this method doesn’t work for everyone. You might want to check your math.
(As a clue, 600 billion is 600e9)
Yes, 600 billion, which I wrote, is 60010^9, which is 6010^10 or 6*10^11.
But I did make a mistake on 8 billion people, so there’s that.
… I guess we just can’t handle large numbers well either way.
EDIT: Fixed and edited to give a better example where this approach works better
Yes, 600 billion, which I wrote, is 600*10^9, which is 60*10^10 or 6*10^11.
Wow, thanks for explaining that to me.
Writing it as 600e9 was a clue for where you messed up the math with the “8e7”.
… I guess we just can’t handle large numbers well either way.
Did you know that a quarter isn’t .25 cents? People get confused by small numbers too.
Base12 is god
I can see why, but it’s going to take a lot of time to switch from the decimal system - a hundred years at least.
Also, I guess I could say powers-of-<base>. We just happen to be using powers of 9+1.
It’s easy when you have 6 fingers.
on each hand
Stanford Pines probably loves base 12.
