India's got 10**5 and 10**7 covered for you with lakh and crore.

Just don't adopt their comma system please: always looks likes typos to me...

i

------ Original Message ------
Received: 07:07 AM COT, 01/04/2014
From: Rob van der Heij <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: OT: SI units and precision

> On 3 January 2014 17:26, Ray Mansell <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Indeed, my post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. My British sense of
> > humour often gets me in trouble here in the US.
> >
> > They don't have any humour there (hoping to get spelling right as an
alien)
>
> I missed my chance to respond on Friday which would be more appropriate,
> but since our newspaper today reported "60 cm" of snow in a town near
> Boston, I could not resist.
>
> There's a lot of truth behind your initial response. By reducing the number
> of different units we use, there is a suggestion of precision that may not
> be founded. Our "60 cm" most likely was 2 feet, and does support the two
> significant digits (especially since snow depth is uneven, and more where
> you have to clean it). I like the idea that Norway use a special unit for
> 10 km distance, so you can express longer distance without suggesting
> precision.
>
> We should have qualifiers with 1 order of magnitude in between, not 3
> orders. To avoid confusion with hex, lets start with "G" for 10, "H" for
> 100, etc.
>
> Rob

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