this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Engineering Memes

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Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The only numbers I will ever spell are one and zero, and only when using them as a pronoun, or for emphasis, respectively.

Is there ever a reason to not to use symbols when dealing with numbers? Why would "fourteen whatevers" ever be preferable to "14 whatevers". It's just so much easier to read numbers as symbols, not spelled out.

(Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion").

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[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

(Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion").

Billion is ambiguous, better use powers of 10, e.g. 273e9 or 273e12, depending on which one you mean

Or use SI units.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Even better haha, this is also my preference, but I think most audiences wouldn't like that, I assume.

Edit: 239,000,000,000 is obviously an option. But I rarely see that in a newspaper.