Hacker News Reader

Comment by firethief | Hacker News Reader

There are an order of magnitude more cattle than there have been equivalent buffalos?

Hmm, I was going to say "No way!" but looking around it seems like 60M buffalo back in the day [1] and at times 100M cows [2], certainly not "order of magnitude" but more cows that buffalo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison#Range_and_popul...

[2] http://www.cattlenetwork.com/advice-and-tips/cowcalf-produce...

Worldwide there are around 1 billion cows [1]

[1] http://beef2live.com/story-world-cattle-inventory-ranking-co...

100M is an order of magnitude more than 60M, by definition. "order of magnitude" doesn't mean "ten times as much", it means "you have to use another column to describe it"... and so 1x10^8 is an order of magnitude more than 6x10^7...

You're just wrong.

Here are three sources that say an order of magnitude means ten times as much:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/order-of-magnitude

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/order+of+magnitude

Each of those links say that it can be used both ways. I was wrong that it wasn't used the OP's way, but not wrong in my own definition of it.

an order of magnitude conventionally means an approximate power of 10; the implicit accuracy of the approximation is such that n orders of magnitude means a multiple between 10^(n-0.5) and 10^(n+0.5).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com