A question... Why do humans (or at least engineers) work so well in 1,000?
I mean. I use milli/micro/nano/pico as an electrical engineer every day, and it's so intuitive to me.
But why three orders of magnitude? Why not two orders, or five?
I mean. I use milli/micro/nano/pico as an electrical engineer every day, and it's so intuitive to me.
But why three orders of magnitude? Why not two orders, or five?
groups of 3 have first, middle, last - crucially _one_ middle digit, not 2+, which makes for quick comprehension.
Sure if you grow up with it, you have that translation basically hard-coded but it’s still not ideal.
Really the worst system of the 3.
It's a rule that will tell you how to write "any number" equally, but it makes all the numbers inconsistent with each other.
Like in English 10000 is ten thousand, there is no new single word for it.
IMO most of it is momentum and convention, there is nothing inherently natural about grouping by every 3 digits.
My graduate advisor loved slipping it into papers just to show it off. I had to dissuade him at least once because it was in the middle of a table of percentages and who is going to that the 7th entry out of 12 has ‰ instead of %?
Never seen permyriads, though.