when people say "orders of magnitude" do they always mean base 10?
(i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
(i'm thinking of how decibels are a log scale sort of thing wrt power, where "orders of magnitude" used as a cliche probably does not mean what it would be read as.)
> An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10
I guess you could think of it like a _really_ low precision float or something.
For instance if the range is '3-13' in base 2 it's similar to '1-4' in base 10, but either way I'm making up numbers so who cares what the base is.
Yes, and that has always bothered me just a little bit, given that there is nothing intrinsically special about base 10 and yet the phrase seems to suggest something fundamental.
Something that scales geometrically might well have some giant constant so it isn’t useful until a specific performance regime.