When is a billion not a billion?

In an internal business meeting today, I was joking about my dubious relationship with numbers—I mix them up easily—when I mentioned a fact that no one in the room was aware of. Until fairly recently, an American billion was not the same as a British billion. What we called a billion, they called a milliard; and what we called a trillion, they called a billion. I'm pretty sure I first heard of this years ago when I stumbled upon the following passage in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

The American system of numeration for denominations above one million was modeled on the French system but more recently the French system has been changed to correspond to the German and British systems. In the American system each of the denominations above 1,000 millions (the American billion) is 1,000 times the preceding one (one trillion = 1,000 billions; one quadrillion = 1,000 trillions). In the British system the first denomination above 1,000 millions (the British milliard) is 1,000 times the preceding one, but each of the denominations above 1,000 milliards (the British billion) is 1,000,000 times the preceding one (one trillion = 1,000,000 billions; one quadrillion = 1,000,000 trillions).

That's still what it says now, despite the fact that, according to Wikipedia, our brothers in the UK adopted the "American" system way back in 1974.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the United Kingdom uniformly used the long scale, while the United States of America used the short scale, so that usage of the two systems was often referred to as "British" and "American" respectively. In 1974 the government of the UK abandoned the long scale, so that the UK now applies the short scale interpretation exclusively in mass media and official usage. Although some residual long-scale usage still continues, the terms "British" and "American" no longer represent accurate terminology.

The more accurate way to refer to these two numerical systems are long scale and short scale. The short scale (in which a billion is a thousand millions) is now used primarily by English-speaking countries (plus, for some reason, Brazil), and the long scale (in which a billion is a million millions) by the rest of the world. To keep things interesting, some countries use the short scale but keep the word "milliard" from the long scale (e.g.: Russia, Israel, Turkey, Iran), while others use a completely different numbering system all together.

China, Japan and Korea use a system based on myriads. Myriad is the Classical Greek name for the number 10,000. I remember this from my time in Japan: 20,000 yen was ni-man 'en (or two ten-thousands). In the Chinese system, which Japan and Korea use, the new denominations come every four places, instead of every three or every six. Therefore, in Japanese, 10,000 man is an oku (1,0000,0000, or what we would call a hundred million) and 10,000 oku is a chou (1,0000,0000,0000, or what we could call a trillion and a Frenchman would call a billion). Whew!

The Indian numbering system, used in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar, creates a new denomination every two decimal places after a thousand. This means that a lakh is 1,00,000 (our one hundred thousand), a crore 1,00,00,000 (our ten million) and arawb 1,00,00,000 (an American's billion or a Frenchman's milliard).

So, in a nutshell, the denominations in the various numbering systems are, for the most part, defined thusly:

Short scale: 10⁰ (one), 10¹ (ten), 10² (a hundred), 10³ (a thousand), 10⁶ (a million), 10⁹ (a billion), 10¹² (a trillion), 10¹⁵ (a quadrillion), 10¹⁸ (a quintillion)...

Long scale: 10⁰ (one), 10¹ (ten), 10² (a hundred), 10³ (a thousand), 10⁶ (a million), 10⁹ (a thousand millions, or a milliard), 10¹² (a billion), 10¹⁵ (a thousand billions, or a billiard), 10¹⁸ (a trillion)...

Chinese: 10⁰, 10¹, 10², 10³, 10⁴, 10⁸, 10¹², 10¹⁶, 10²⁰...

Indian: 10⁰, 10¹, 10², 10³, 10⁵, 10⁷, 10⁹, 10¹¹, 10¹³...

I guess the next thing to do would be to explain why in French, their word for 78 translates to "sixty-eighteen" and 92 is "four twenties and twelve." Maybe just for laughs.

It seems the knower has become... the knowee.

My Secret Hospital teammate Michael Hartney has "tagged" me on his blog, which apparently means I have to post eight random things about myself. I'm not sure that any of you who know me don't already know these things about me, or that those of you don't know me would care, but I guess that's the point of a blog, right? I talk about myself and assume someone out there is listening. Whoever you are, prepare to have your world rocked.

1. I speak Esperanto.
Really. I picked up a book on it when I was in Japan. It was something I'd been curious about since I first heard read about it, and having spent some time trying to learn Japanese, I was attracted to the idea of a(n almost) perfectly regular language. And it is easy to learn: check it out yourself.

What's more embarrassing—even more embarrassing than the fact that I can't spell the word embarrassing—is that I've recently picked it up again, after having lent the book to my friend Stan. "I'll just brush up, in case he wants to practice speaking with someone," I told myself, probably out loud. And now I'm studying it again. For the record, I have spent some time trying to learn the following languages (in order of how much time I spent studying them, from most to least): French (which I speak assez bien), Japanese, Esperanto, American Sign Language, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Ancient Greek, German and Indonesian.

2. I don't have any wisdom teeth, and never will.
My dentist always thought that was cool, and I agree. Something like 95% of adults have at least one wisdom tooth... or did before they were rudely ripped from their mangled gums. I am very thankful to be in the wisdom-deprived 5%.

"I guess that means you're not wise," the wiseasses quip. "Or I'm more highly evolved," I retort. Turns out the wiseasses may be right, according to Wikipedia:

In dentistry, hypodontia is the condition of naturally having fewer than the regular number of teeth. In Caucasians, the most commonly missing teeth are the wisdom teeth (25-35%), the upper lateral incisors (2%) or the lower second premolars (3%) The congenital absence of all teeth is called anodontia. Hypodontia is often familial, or associated with ectodermal dysplasia or Down syndrome.

3. I wrote the tagline to the film Erin Brockovich.
I've written lots of taglines for movies and TV shows, but that's one of the more memorable examples. "She brought a small town to its feet... and a huge company to its knees." More recently, Cinderella Man used a very similar tagline for its poster.

Some of my co-workers at the time complained that it reminded them too much of oral sex, I guess because of that famous incident where a woman forced a utility company to give her head.

4. I am related to President William Howard Taft.
...supposedly. My grandmother's maiden name was Taft, and is supposed to have been related to the Ohio Tafts who gave us the fattest president in US history.

I feel sorry for the guy. He wasn't a very good president, apparently, but he never really wanted to be president in the first place. He wanted to be on the Supreme Court, and only after leaving behind the White House and its impossibly small bathtub did he finally get his wish.

5. I was on Jeopardy! and Project Greenlight.
Lost both. (My screenplay Skeletons was in the top 50 screenplays for the latter.)

Ashley Ward, who is also on Secret Hospital with me, was on Jeopardy! too. She won.

6. I've always wanted to be in a band.
I'm sort of the same way with musical instruments as I am with languages... I fiddle with learning lots of them in a half-assed way. I started out playing clarinet, which led to bass clarinet and sax. Then, in college, I had the good sense to learn guitar, which is much better for getting girls than a saxophone, no matter what Lane Myers* thinks. In my room now, I have two guitars, a mandolin and a flute someone was getting rid of. I always dreamed of being that guy in the band who plays everything, like Brian Jones (without the dying), or one of the guys from Camper Van Beethoven.

Also, I've always wanted to name a band Midwife Crisis.

7. My grandparents had a cottage on Lake George in the Adirondacks, and as a kid I went there every summer.
I sometimes focus on the bad or weird parts of my childhood, but man, was I lucky to have had this place. Everything about it is so vivid in my memory. The smell of coffee in the morning, Grandma and Grandpa at the table doing the Jumble. Spending days swimming, waterskiing, jumping off the upper deck when we were old enough, canoeing to a nearby island for a picnic. Showering up for cocktail hour, playing pitch and munching on peanuts (my cousins and my sister and I brandishing our sophisticated Shirley Temples). Buying comic books at the tiny market, gray days playing miniature golf, Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies, Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon on the TV....

I think if I had three wishes, one would be that for one week a summer, I could take whomever I wanted back to Lake George, and everything would be exactly the same.

Except that I could drink real cocktails.

8. I don't have any tattoos, but I often think about what tattoo I would choose.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against them per se. I've gotten as close as going into a parlor and leafing through the books. The two things that stop me are that I have no idea what I would want on me forever, and that I'm not all lean and muscled. And also that my entire body is covered in freckles and moles. What if I got a mermaid and a big mole appeared in the middle of her face? People would be all, "Why did you you get a tattoo of a mermaid with cancer?"

I think, if I had to get a tattoo now, it would be of Drinky Crow. I love love love Tony Millionaire's comic strip Maakies, and Drinky is one of those characters you just want to draw again and again in your notebook during a boring lecture. And, for some reason, I find pathetic alcoholics really funny. Sorry, pathetic alcoholics.

I had a neat idea recently. I was looking at my back and thinking how there are way too many freckles for me to get a tattoo. It's like a starry sky at night. Then I imagined Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby at the bottom of my back, looking up at the stars. Or Uncle Gabby would be looking at the stars, anyway. Drinky would be drinking. Or holding a gun to his head. And no, that would not count as a "tramp stamp."


I'm done! Those are my eight random facts. Now I have to tag eight people with blogs, which for me is hard. (Do I even know enough people with blogs?) I tag Sarah, Rob, Annie, Michele, Glennis, Erika, Jen, and, what the heck... Jonathan Coulton. I predict a 12.5% rate of return.

*John Cusack's character from Better Off Dead. And anyway, you can totally tell that a) his fingers are not in the right position for him to be playing that saxophone, and b) you're really hearing a synthesizer on the "sax" setting.