Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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Oh you think that was bad? When I was that age my teachers were flagging to my parents that I kept switching between American and British spellings at random. Doing lots of programming in US English was causing my schoolwork to be frequently marked wrong (the teachers were fortunately quite forgiving about this type of mistake). It was just hard at that age to remember which of "color" and "colour" were correct in different contexts and ditto for a bunch of other words. Also for a brief period I thought the right way to write a zero was with a strikethrough because of the monospace fonts.

Other fun US/UK cultural issues: interview questions like "how many pingpong balls fit in a school bus". To Brits a school bus could be literally anything from a coach to a small vehicle, they aren't standardized like in the US. Even when you remember the big yellow buses from films, how big are they? If you never saw one in real life it's hard to imagine. Also it took a while before I figured out that "ping pong" meant table tennis. Fun times.

And then there's things like million and billion being literal magnitudes different.

"England and America are two countries separated by a common language."

The long scale (million, milliard, billion, billiard) has been obsolete both officially and unofficially in Britain for decades.

Which is tragic, because it's more correct mathematically.

I'm American, and I grew up with the short scale, so I always though it made obvious sense: every time you add a comma, you jump up. So 1,000,000 is a million, 1,000,000,000 is a billion.

But 10^9 is a billion and 10^12 is a trillion makes very little sense. I mean, I know it's 1,000 * 1,000^2 and 1,000 * 1,000^3, but it seems to make more sense to me to say that a million million is a billion, and a million million million is a trillion. So 1,000,000^2 and 1,000,000^3, with the bi and tri right there.

Still, that ship has long sailed, so 1,000 * 1,000^3 for a trillion it is.

I've been thinking we can un-sail that ship by getting explicit about which scale (when it's relevant).

Always "million", but any time you say "billion" say "long billion" or "short billion". If it catches on, after a sufficient period we can drop the "long" once everyone realizes that long is better (and gives us milliards and billiards).

We need more uses of long and short - a kilometer is a short mile, a kilogram is a long pound, etc.

Maybe? It's a little different in that with the numbers it actually disambiguates.

So has the English system of measurements in the US :(

My early programming was on BBC Micro and some Acorn machines in school. There, the programming and documentation was all spelt correctly, from memory. "colour", "dialogue", "catalogue", and so on. It wasn't until I started on a PC that I got the Americanisation of computer stuff.

To this day, I still name things internally with the spellings I'm used to despite working in an international company (where it makes sense of course, not in a way that might lead to actual time wasted due to confusion.)

I still write a zero with a line through - I think it makes it very clear (with my terrible handwriting) that it is indeed a number!

In high school, circa 1980, there were a few of us who were into computers. In math class, one of us thought it would be cool to write zeros with slashes through them, because that is how our computers printed them. He got marked down on his homework because a zero with a slash through it meant the empty set. Context matters I suppose. I think there are enough clues in this comment that this was in the US, not the UK.

Here's a fun story. I left academia right after my Ph.D and moved to London, where I started freelancing as a software developer. Naturally, I joined a coworking space, since I was new in town and wanted to meet people. This coworking space had a weekly social event where new members were introduced over drinks, and I was promptly asked to go on stage and introduce myself and say a few words about my professional background.

I hopped on stage and started talking about my Ph.D in cognitive neuroscience. I told them that I was studying how the attentional system is involved in conscious perception. To make it a bit more tangible, I asked everybody to close their eyes, and said "I've now been talking to you for a few minutes. With your eyes closed, I want you to tell me what color pants I'm wearing."

If you're British, you're likely roaring with laughter at this point. For the Americans: pants means underwear in the Queen's English.

We all had a jolly good laugh.

When a graduate student, I once shoved a sample into a -80 ºC freezer with a template on the front showing what everything was, written in pencil as an index (everything was stored in a metal rack in a particular position and they all looked identical from the top – it was a bit of a pain to find your sample if you didn't know where to look as you'd have to lift them all out and rummage). Someone had removed something and not removed its name from the index on the door, and I'd placed my sample in its place, let's say into spot H6.

I went around the corner and popped my head into the nearest office – a female (and conventionally attractive) American post-doc I didn't know terribly well was sitting there typing and I just said, "Hey, <name> do you have a rubber I could borrow in a hurry for just a moment? I'll bring it back in less than two minutes, promise!". She changed colour, burst out laughing, and handed me "an eraser"...

Oh man, that's a very unfortunate choice of words :'D

Table tennis is the name of the sport. Ping-pong is a brand of table tennis equipment.

Huh really. This is like with Hoover then, where the term became generic? I only ever heard ping-pong used as the name of the sport.

Another thing that confused me and lots of other British children: why do so many American program brand names begin with the apparently meaningless letters EZ? Eee-zed doesn't mean anything!

'EZ' is meant to be read as 'Easy', I think.

Yep. It's embarrassing how long it took a teenage me to figure that one out, though.

I believe the confusion is over the letter Z. Commonwealth countries would pronounce that "zed" while in America that letter is pronounced "zee" (rhyming with letters like B, C, D, etc.).

EZ would be pronounced "easy".

Hoover (vacuum), Xerox (copy), Flex (angle grinder), the bright yellow post it note (3m trademark), pretty funny stuff

Busses aren't standardized here, either. I've certainlu seen vans used in rural areas.

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