The Off Topic Topic

[Maladict]

To be fair, Josq just wants to return to the UK before 1948.

Fyp

[mongers]

A billion is not 1000 million but a million million.

Hillary or Sav, tell me what this means.  I thought he wanted to change the meaning of "billion" from 1,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000.

Traditionally, and for longer in the UK, a million was a though thousand, a billion a million millions, a trillion a billion billions, etc.  That led to some very awkwardly long numbers, though, so the French, and later the US, adopted the power of three system where everything above a thousand was a multiple of a thousand.  That only became the international norm post-WW2.

This.

And in fact it was somewhat later for many in the UK; I learnt in O and A-level mathematics that a billion was a million millions. Likely sometime in the early 80s my generation would adopted the new international standard.

[Sheilbh]

Traditionally, and for longer in the UK, a million was a though thousand, a billion a million millions, a trillion a billion billions, etc.  That led to some very awkwardly long numbers, though, so the French, and later the US, adopted the power of three system where everything above a thousand was a multiple of a thousand.  That only became the international norm post-WW2.

I once had to some work from Indian sources and I was (and still am) absolutely bamboozled by lakhs and crores

[mongers]

An excellent Sky at Night programme interviewing Clyde Tombaugh abou this discovery of the planet Pluto:
The Man Who Discovered A Planet

[grumbler]

An excellent Sky at Night programme interviewing Clyde Tombaugh abou this discovery of the dwarf planet Pluto:
The Man Who Discovered A Planet

FTFY

Neil deGrasse Tyson had a funny built where he pointed out that any aliens trying to follow the Voyager plaques to find Earth will pass the Solar System by because the plaque shows nine planets and the Solar System only has eight.