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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

If you're exposed to figures written in scientific notation, then learn scientific notation (it's not even hard, the number represents the number of zeros you'd write if you had to write it entirely: 5000 = 5⋅10³ / 5E3, 0,0003 = 3⋅10^-4).

As said above, it has nothing to do with the metric system anyway, it's just about dealing conveniently with very big or very tiny value (1⋅10^-9 meter is 3.9⋅10^-8 inch, no matter the unit you're using you'd be using scientific notation to express things that small instead of dealing with 8 or 9 zeros).

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Thanks for the advice I never considered trying to learn scientific notation. I think the way the problem manifests in combination with the metric system is that the metric system seems to have an extra 1,000 that may or may not apply.

I think my particular problem is when dealing with electricity and physics.

I never once blamed the metric system and identified the problem as my in ability to comprehend values in scientific notation. I appreciate I shouldn't be so dumb and try to read about things I don't understand. It's a life long struggle.

> is that the metric system seems to have an extra 1,000 that may or may not apply.

You may be getting confused over prefixes vs base units because some pairs of prefixes and base units are so common they sort-of end up treated as a unit in themselves.

E.g. "kilo" is not a metric unit, but sometimes used as short for "kilogram", where "kilo" is the prefix for 1000 and "gram" is the metric unit. These prefixes are consistent for all metric units.

"Kilometer" is another popular unit, which is never called "kilo", lately I heard it's informally called "click" in US. Logic is the same, kilometer means a thousand meters, and meter is the base unit of length.

I once worked with someone from Egypt who used "kilo" for kilometers. He's the only person I've met who did that. I've no idea if that was just a personal quirk or if that was a common shortening elsewhere in the world.

> where "kilo" is the prefix for 1000 and "gram" is the metric unit.

Fun fact: the metric unit for mass is … the kilogram, not the gram because f*ck consistency.

No, just because historical :) . There's the system centimeter-gram-second, which is used e.g. for electromagnetic physics, it has its own quirks, at least with "centi"-meter unit name.

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