Ceaseless Student

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?