Re: CHAT: Measurements (was: Re: CHAT: browsers)

* Jake X said on 2003-02-14 03:54:05 +0100
> Nik scrub:
> > Jake X wrote:
> > > _hyaku sen_  is a hundred thousend.  You men hyaku man. :)
> >
> > Oops.  of course.  :-)  And "hundred thousand" is actually _juu man_
> > (ten ten-thousand)
> It also interests me how the form of spoken numbers is so deeply
> entwined in the written numerical form, e.g. three digit "periods"
> etc. When I learned Akkadian numbers, even though I could convert to
> and from base ten, I could only think of the number in terms of either
> decimal numbers or the equivalent decimal reading of the same digits.
> Maybe if I spoke a language based on a different base, I would be more
> equipped to handle it mentally, but acquiring the system and
> converting with my L1 would be very difficult.
Thanks to long over-exposure to the grittier parts of computing I feel
quite at home with binary, base 8 and base 16, which is handy since my
Taruven uses base 8 :) Not so well that I can convert quickly, on the
fly, in my head, between bases; but well enough that I have a feel for
whether numbers in those bases are roughly in the same ballpark. With
huge numbers, that's what you want anyway. Long live scientific
notation :)


t., who ought to upload the latest thoughts on how to *write* numbers
in Taruven...