A better way to say numbers
So this is actually an old thought, but I haven't really pushed it around much.
Numbers are really bad at being said. They're also not good at being thought about or manipulated mentally when they get big or small. They give information in all the wrong places. For example: seven-hundred-and-sixty billion has all of its good information in two places. Most of it is in billion. Then there's a lot in hundred and some in the fact that its seven hundreds... My point is: it sucks. Whoever designed numbers didn't do good design. (<-- j/k kids) So let's look at how this has been solved before - scientific notation. 7.6x10^11 Not bad. Especially because the brain handles the whole thing as a unit so it can get the 11 early on. The order of magnitude is by far the most important thing. Even better is 7.6e11. That has less extraneous stuff and says the same thing. But it's not meant to be spoken. Even so, if you say 7.6e11 it's much faster than seven-hundred-and-sixty billion.
But it could be better. The order of magnitude should be first. So what I like is inverting the order of magnitude and the fine grain number and saying the x10^.
Something like: 11mag7.6
And we could get rid of another couple of syllables by hitting small numbers with a contraction for x10^ -
As in a microsecond is 6neg second. Oh yeah. You could just leave out a number and have a 1 be implied.
Just to use it somewhere I'll copy over a problem from my estimation class. We're estimating the budget of Pasadena. We've found that Pasadena has about 4mag2 acres of land. We estimated the cost of land at $6mag/acre. And we're going with a property tax of 1%. So:
4mag2 acres * 6mag USD/acre * 2neg USD/USD = 8mag2 USD
I like that we the format of the number makes it natural to do the exponents first (which is the important data. I'm not sure how I feel about something like:
3mag2 * 1neg8 = 2mag16 = 3mag1.6
It should really get into the last form, but the second form is more natural. Meh.
Thoughts?
8 comments:
While I agree that switching the magnitude to the front gives the important information first, there's actually a cultural bias in saying that the important information should be first. In English, that's how we do things with our SVO word order. But in Japanese, Korean, and other SOV languages, the verb, which is usually the most important part of the sentence, comes last. So in those languages, it makes perfect sense to have the magnitude at the end.
Also, in Japanese, you say the denominator of a fraction before the numerator (three-fourths --> four parts's three, roughly). It's fun stuff.
Fair enough. That being said - I think the important part is the Boris bias and not the cultural bias. While our cultural is big on information, I'm big on efficiency. I really see no purpose in waiting around. And four parts three would be cute, but less effective than say .75
Oh, no doubt. I would totally go around saying 11mag7.6 if people knew what I meant by it. Maybe you should give it a test run at Olin and see if it catches on.
Working on it...
Dude. I've wanted to do that for years.
I think this is why we go into electronics and computers and get happily geeked out over things like well-designed protocols (or am I the only one who enjoys reading good specs?)
David beat me to the language comment; I was going to chime in on Chinese, which does the same, stringing from less to more specific terms (I prefer describing them as "specific" instead of "important" because that's also a cultural factor) as you proceed into a sentence.
For instance, "on the 9th day of May last year, in the afternoon" would be rendered "last year, May, day 9, afternoon." Roughly. It sounds a lot better without the mangled transliteration to English.
Speaking of date notation, the MM/DD/YYYY thing has long been a mild tic of mine; YYYY/MM/DD/HH/MM/SS, or the other way around without the AM/PM stuff, please. But occasionally-logical standardization often creates local pockets of efficiency maxima that ignore the greater gains to be had from a widespread switchover to... say, the metric system. So "efficiency" is a weirdly relative term, depending on who you're talking to.
Is this one of the reasons you started learning Esperanto?
Hey Mel!
I'm firstly amused that your comment is almost as long as my post b/c I thought I was starting to go on too long...
Esperanto was just b/c I'm a weird nerd-type. It's actually not very efficient as word order has no meaning... oh well. It's not meant to be efficient; it's meant to be effective.
I like what I say to be more and more specific as the sentence continues b/c, well, it's sensible. At least to Boris with all of his cultural and inherent biases.
Learn Chinese, then.
Haha. I'll add that to my to-do list right around learn to play piano, learn to draw really awesomely in pen, and learn to walk stealthily. Sounds neat, but I don't actually have the interest to do them...
Post a Comment