Gazillions of miniature violins

[venta]

So, recently I was perusing the packaging for a USB memory stick (no, I don't get out much). I was vaguely confused by it. It turns out that numbers are even less clear-cut than I thought they were.

The USB stick was advertised as 2GB. As I'm sure many of you know, that's not actually a very precise measurement. (If you know all about that you can skip the next paragraph).

A kilobyte, for example, is approximately a thousand bytes. Owing to computers' pesky habit of doing everything in powers of two it's not actually a 1000 bytes, it's 1024 bytes. 24 bytes out of a thousand - big deal, let's call it a thousand bytes. A megabyte is a thousand kilobytes, and by that stage it's become more of an issue whether you mean 1,000,000 bytes, or whether you mean 1,048,576 (= 1024 x 1024) bytes. And the trouble with the term 'megabyte' is that people use it to mean both values. I relatively recently learned that the abbreviation MB is ambiguous, while the less-common abbreviation MiB specifically means the larger, non-decimal-friendly number. The same is true for gigabyte (GB/GiB), only more so.

Fortunately, the manufacturers of the USB stick were clued up to this problem, and wrote on the packaging that 1GB = 1 billion bytes. OK, I thought; modulo the warnings about not all space being available for storage, we know where we are.

Then I thought hang on, a gigabyte isn't a billion bytes. It's 1,000,000,000 bytes. A billion would be 1,000,000,000,000. Since this is for sale in the UK, they should use UK billions (the larger number) not US billions. Humph, I thought.

However, ChrisC pointed me at the Wikipedia page about the word billion. This distinguishes between a "short scale" billion (1,000,000,000) and a "long scale" billion (1,000,000,000,000). It then goes on to say:

In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage.

You what ? Twenty years after that decision was made, my school was still teaching me that a UK billion was a million million ? Despite that usage having been dropped before I was even born ?

I'm genuinely disgruntled about this. I've been misreading news reports and financial projections and population estimates for my entire life ?

Did you all know this ?

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Yes, I still consider my height in inches, weight in stones & pounds

I do that too, but it's mostly because I'd otherwise have to recalibrate all my intuitive measuring. I can look at someone and think "about 5'3", 11st", not because imperial's easier but because as a small child our bathroom scales used imperial and it's been the units I've worked in ever since.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

That's the thing - imperial may not be consistent in unit, or easy to convert between relevant measures - but they very fact all the measures developed organically means that a lot of the measures are very easy to gt a mental handle on.

I mean, pancake batter!

1 egg, 1/2 pint milk, 1/4 lb flour, pinch of salt; makes about 1/2 dozen (depending on size of pan). Same can be used for a 12-pudding tin of Yorkshire Puddings, but don't ask me for cooking times/temperatures :)

How do you put that neatly in metric without messing with the proportions? (NB: honourable exception for duck eggs, which make yummy pancakes but are obviously different from hen eggs - 1 duck egg only makes about 4 pancakes where hen eggs would make 6, & the batter is far gloopier...clearly if I want to be fussy about my eggs, I need to adapt the inherited recipe :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Ooh - want to try duck egg pancakes now!

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Is that egg from a 600g dozen or a 720g dozen?
*ducks*

[venta.livejournal.com]

No, not ducks. Chickens. Weren't you listening ?

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

My mistake¹. Though I do miss M&S crispy duck pancakes.

Here you go:
*chickens*


¹sort of - the pun was not lost on me... :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Eggs vary more in mass than the difference between 1/2 pint and 250ml, and 1/4 lb and 125g.

So I imagine the recipe is "2:1 liquid:flour, 4 eggs per litre" or some such. Milk being close enough to water in density that it doesn't matter whether you take the ratio by mass, or as something with the unusual dimensions of mlg^-1.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

.. whereas I consider heights in inches as that's what everyone self describes as, and weight in kg, as our bathroom scales had both, and kg seemed more precise. I've become somewhat adept at multiplying by 6.3 or .45 as appropriate when I hear people using the other units.