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Comment by abrahamsen | Hacker News Reader

> Not to mention that a Danish "billion" is not the same as a US "billion".

Google correctly translates the Danish original "milliard" to the US "billion". A 5 (Danish) billion kroner fine would be higher than our total GDP.

> this is one of the fewer cases where US metric makes much more sense.

Don't see that. A bi-llion is million million. A tri-llion is a million million million. Makes perfect sense to me.

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Ah, I like to think in steps of factors 10^3. Thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion. Very rarely do you get to numbers above this (non-science related), and when you do, scientific notation is more relatable.

I think I have almost never in my life (in Norway), seen "Billiard", "Trillion" or "Trilliard" used anywhere.

As you noted, we still have factor 1000 steps. -ard is 1000 -ion.

You're right. I should also have mentioned that it was more intuitive (for me), that {mono-, di-, tri-} was the 1000 factor prefix, as opposed to {mono-|{-ion,-ard}, di-|{-ion,-ard}, tri-|{-ion,-ard}}.

I'm not arguing expressibility. It's just different names. I just found the system my country uses (long scale) to be less intuitive than the one used by the US (short scale).

Just take a look at the comparison [1], and make up your own mind on what is intuitive, and what not. I'm not saying you or anyone is "wrong". I find it hard to see good reason for the long scale, but I'll entertain arguments.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_and_short_sca...

A good argument against the short scale is that it has a confusing offset. A quadrillion (short scale) is 1000^(4+1)=10^15.

> Don't see that. A bi-llion is million million. A tri-llion is a million million million. Makes perfect sense to me.

Why is the million the base unit? Numbers are always written in groups of thousand, not million.

Sorry, but in this I agree with okamiueru - the short scale system makes much more sense.

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