Ceaseless Student

So I’ve actually been trying to use my number system and have decided some things are clunky. One change that was easy was a writing thing. I now do 3M4 (read 3mag4) and 5N3 (read 5neg3). That just makes things faster.

But the worst thing was actually pointed out to me by someone in my estimation IS. They said negative numbers were easy to confuse with negative orders of magnitude. I’m not sure what the best solution here is - I’m thinking the original setup is best, but ideas would be mighty useful.

Positive stuff is great:

Light year 15M9.5 m 9.5×10^15 m

I just love that. It feels great. But then we have negatives… here’s the original set-up.

psi 4N1.5 Pa 1.5×10^-4 N/m^2

Now, that’s a little hard to read b/c N and M don’t look very different, but it’s unambiguous. Here’s a different idea to get rid of “neg” because it mucks things up…

psi -4M1.5 Pa

That would be great if it didn’t have an issue with this next one. under my original scheme:

Electron charge -19N1.6 Pa -1.6×10^-19 N/m^2

But getting rid of “neg” leaves me kinda confused here….

Electron charge -(-19M1.6 Pa)

Yeah. Gross.

So currently the negative sign shows that the whole number is negative and the N shows that the magnitude is negative. Do people think this works well enough? Ideas for improvement?

Just a parting thought… would it be better with Pos and Neg instead of Mag and Neg? P and N are easier to see so it might be better like:
-19N1.6 and 15P9.5.

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?