Talk:Order of magnitude

Archive of resolved talk:

Talk:Orders of magnitude (chain page names)

and also:

Talk:Orders of magnitude (template)

Summary

Suggestion: The individual size pages should probably all have a link back to this overview.
Resolution: Not clear, but most of the size pages have one anyway.

Suggestion: Add a column of examples for each order of magnitude.
Resolution: Added, then removed.
Discussion

Suggestions for new chains:
- A comparison of times would also be nice. --AxelBoldt Resolution: Done.
- dimensionless numbers, like the number of stars in the Galaxy, the number of cells in the human body, and the largest known prime, the population of various countries and cities.
- speeds (m/s = mps) of light, sound in various materials, ..., running animals, etc.
- Add frequencies (Hz) for light, radio, sound, etc.
Resolution: No major objections to these new chain ideas; not done because no-one's been willing to do the grunt work yet.

Further discussion not organized.

Sorry but this bit of Wiki just doesn't do the business for me. I know that I should put the effort in to sort it but I just don't have the confidence to replace all this stuff. Could we get some more views?

What "bit of Wiki" do you mean exactly? What do you think needs sorting? What do you think needs replacing? You solicit views about what exactly? --AxelBoldt

I generally agree that this page, while already very useful, needs work.

There seem to be two differing views going on here, concept and preciseness. I'm not convinced that the concept of scale is all that difficult to grasp, except when dealing with very large or very small and even then perhaps we're only providing a list of nice facts (grains of sand in a teaspoon v sahara). Conversely exactly what kind of day and precisely how many seconds it has doesn't matter when dealing with scale because the detail is irrelevant except to a scientist who already understands this stuff anyway?

I revert to my original question of the purpose of this all is, except that it creates a lot of pages? -Rjstott

Linking to external unit converter

Permission to massively link to convertion calculator pages at: www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/res2/calcs/calaindx.htm

I asked:

Thank you for providing this great resource!

I have been adding links to your converters from various pages at
http://www.wikipedia.org which is a free on-line, not for profit encyclopedia
that is built by hundreds of volunteers.

I know I should have asked permission to do this first and I apologize for
not doing that -- but your calculators are so perfect that I started linking
them right away.

If this is not to your liking I will remove or modify the links as you wish.
Here is an example of how I am linking your pages;
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density

Our website is an open wiki so you can edit that page and its link to your
page to however you like (if you edit the external link, I will follow that
style for the other links I have made to your website -- space, Wikipedia
style and reason permitting of course).

F.Tapson who is the author of each page responded:

No problem.
I always welcome links (isn't that what the Web is all about?)
It is copying that I object to. I fail to understand how so many people
feel it is OK to build their own Website using other people's material!
I have just had a look at the Wikipedia. Very nice idea which I have now
bookmarked.
Thanks for letting me know.

The converter is a very useful resource to link to. But wouldn't it be safer to only link from one Wikipedia article, in case the URL changes in the future? -- Tarquin

That notion did cross my mind. But since I have notified the author about our extensive linking to his pages he will probably set up legacy links when/if he reorganizes or moves. Besides I plan on being here for some time so if links get broken I will fix them. I think that having these links wherever they are appropriate will be most useful. For example, the country template now only lists square kilometres for area in order to save space. However since there is a link to that article via km² that in turn has an external link to an area converter, then all is well with not including square miles. --mav

I think that links to Conversion of units (which of course should have integrated links to the unit converter) would be easier to maintain and more informative to the readers. AxelBoldt 08:55 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Name of this page

First, why is this list of different units of measurement on a page called "orders of magnitude"? The latter does not mean "units of measurement." Why not put it on a units of measurement (or better, listing of units of measurement) page?

I'm not sure that "listing of units of measurement" would be more appropriate. We already have SI unit and conversion of units, and all units are listed there. "Meter" is a unit of length, but 100m, 1000m, 10000m are not. I believe they are often called "orders of magnitude of length".

What we could do though is to break this list up and put the length part on length, the mass part on mass etc., under a headline of "orders of magnitude of length" or similar. That however would lose the connection between different units, such as the connection between length and time given by the speed of light. Maybe we should do both: put it on length, together with nice examples for every order of magnitude, and keep it here as a general reference table. --AxelBoldt

Second, there are names like 1e-15 m. For someone who wants to know what "1e-15 m" means, in the article, we are told: "To help compare different orders of magnitudes this page lists lengths between 10-15 m and 10-14 m." This isn't very helpful for someone who doesn't know what "1e-15 m" means in the first place. For instance, what does that mean, using decimal places? Yes, any well-educated person knows how to figure it out; but a Wikipedia article about X, remember, is always for the benefit of a (perhaps theoretical) person who doesn't know much at all about X.

Larry, I changed 1e-15 m to be hopefully more informative in this regard. What do you think of that style? Also, these pages are not intended to be linked without an alias to a particular measure like [[1e-15 m|20 millionths of an angstrom]], so I do not think we need worry too much about the page names per se. --Eob

Third, I generally agree with the person who said (somewhere) that the titles of these articles could perhaps be stated in more clearly recognizable words and numbers, without symbols, e.g.: 1,000,000,000 meters (or metres, if you insist). What's wrong with that, at least with the magnitudes close to 1?

Fourth, I think the simplest, single examples should be given for each unit of measurement at each order of magnitude. Again, the whole point here is not to make a pretty table but to make concepts clear to people who do not understand them. If we need several tables, grand, let's make them.

In general, try to bear in mind that our task here is to make concepts as simple as possible--it is not to build a merely pretty-and-clever system of webpages. Prettiness and cleverness are good but must be entirely subsumed under the task of making concepts clear to those who do not have them. --LMS

I disagree with the absolute mish-mash of units being used in this table. I replaced angstroms with nanometres, and gave microns their SI name (micrometres), but it still has four different units being used to measure distances (metres, nanometres, astronomical units and light years). Similarly, for time it has seconds, days, years, etc., for volumes it has cubic metres and litres, for mass grams, kilograms and tonnes, for energy joules and electron volts... the whole idea of "orders of magnitude" would be clearer if a single unit is used throughout. -- SJK

My intent was to use at each scale the units that is used most commonly (by scientists and technologists) at that scale. I think, using units appropriate to the scale gives a better intuitive sense of the orders of magnitude. As regards Angstrom, my understanding is that in the 10^-10m range scientists in a lot of fields use that unit a lot (if not mostly). Similarly, I think "micron" is more familiar than "micrometre". --Eob

Change of Units within chains

The use of units such as 'hour', 'day', 'year', is bad, because there are a number of different definitions of each of these units. For example, there are several different astronomically defined years, there is the calendar year (whose length varies from year to year, and depends on the calendar being used), there are fixed length years (e.g. the Julian year of 365.25 days used in astronomy.) Which one is it refferring to? Likewise 'day' can be defined astronomically, or on the basis of the calendar (in which case most days are 86400 s long, but a few are 86401 s long, and in theory they can be 86399 s as well), or conventionally as 86400 s.

Of course one could argue that the differences here are too small to make a difference, but I still think that the use of units with varying definitions and varying magnitudes is ugly. Which is why I'd say, stick to the SI second.

I'd admit some scientists still use microns and angstroms, but these units are ugly because they aren't constructed systematically. They are officially discouraged by BIPM, CGPM, national standards laboratories, ISO, and by many of the international scientific unions. They are the metric equivalent of feet and inches... -- SJK

Does that mean we should change the pages such as 1000km2 -- so the whole of that chain is in m² ? I would be in favour of that -- Tarquin

That was my plan. Everything should be in primary SI units. So km is out and m is in. --mav

Other Chains

Should we make a chain of pages for dimensionless & unitless numbers? eg "number of hairs on human hair", "number of stars in the mily way", "number of hairs on head of Yul Bryner" Any thoughts on names for full-chain pages: length comparison? -- Tarquin 02:19 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Yup, I suggested dimensionless number comparisons on the top of this page. As to naming them, how about simply 1 E 20 and 1e20? AxelBoldt 08:55 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Has the naming style in general been ironed out? Dimensionless numbers would folloe that style, but without a unit suffix. Is it "1 E 2 {unit}" or "1e2 {unit}"? -- Tarquin 09:01 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

I thought we decided on 1 E20 m and 1 E-20 m -- I just haven't had time to do the grunt work. --mav

Okay. I'm off to do some grunt work extending the volume chain so Hoover Dam can link in to it. Please could someone check I've changed the correct numbers on each page, I have a morbid fear of missing one! -- Tarquin

Column Layout of this page

Moved this from "TalkAboutExampleColumn":

I think the example column should be placed immediately after the column of dimensions that it's an example of. As it is now, it's unclear what dimension things in the example column are an example of; for example, is the Sun an example of something that is 10⁹m in diameter, or is it an example of something with an area of 10¹⁸m²? This gets even more confusing when mass is considered as well. I'll move it over and see if it looks okay.

There, fixed. If everybody hates this, revert it; otherwise I'm going to add empty example columns for the other measurements as well for future expansion. :)

Hmmm, I think having an example for every unit might clutter up the table too much. My intention of lining things up in rows the way I did was to show a general sense of order of magnitude of objects that have "normal" densities (within an order of magnitude of water at 1000 kg/m³). But perhaps this is not appropriate as things like sub-atomic particles and galaxies have densities that are much-much bigger or smaller. So perhaps on reconsideration we should try to keep the table clean and not put examples columns, but just have people link down to the pages to see the examples. --Eob

Hi 129.128.164.xxx, thanks for entering all those examples, but I think that now the table is getting too cluttered up and some of the examples are not in the individual pages. I suggest we do get rid of the examples column and move them to the individual pages. That way they will be more useful in other pages that link to those pages. --Eob

Heh. Sorry, got a bit carried away and wasn't reading Talk updates while I worked. :) I was getting those examples off of http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/distances.html for the most part, if you want more precice measurements. I think it'd be good to have at least a few examples scattered throughout the range of this table, however; otherwise the measurements are just meaningless numbers. - BD, from a public terminal

Here is my reasons for not including examples in the table:

1. I think the table should be as clean as possible. This will become particularly important if we add columns for time, temperature, pressure, etc.
2. The formatting on this table is tricky because of the use of HTML tables. Many people will have problems editing it if we are going to keep on adding examples. (In fact some of the recent edits had bad HTML which might have caused problems with some browsers.) I think that it should be more like the periodic table which does not get modified very often once it is set up.
3. Having the same info in two places would make it hard to maintain.

The table would be a lot more fun if there was an example of something of that size at each order of magnitude, sort of the equivalent of the Eames film or this link Quarks to Quasars. Ortolan88

Yes that is pretty neat. How might this be done though? --mav

Well (A) we could link a couple of these animations (there's more than one kicking around) and (B) simply add an example at each size: fox is 10 times bigger than a rat is 10 times bigger than a cockroach is 10 times bigger than a lentil is 10 times bigger than whatever a lentil is 10 times bigger than, etc, till we got all the way down and all the way up. Ortolan88

It's a good idea. It might bloat the table a bit, depends on how many columns we add. It might be better to keep this main table as is, and put a more interesting versions on volume, length, area etc. For that matter, I can see why 1g, 1cm, 1cm^2 share a row, but why 1 picosecond? -- Tarquin

here is an example (you'll need to allow Java to view it though). --KQ

Tarquin wrote: I can see why 1g, 1cm, 1cm^2 share a row, but why 1 picosecond? -- Tarquin

Read the article: 1 ps is the time it takes light to go 1 cm (give or take a factor of 3).

Personally, I don't think that this is a good idea. For a table like this, we should stick to Earth sized relationships between units. Plus, our factors will be much closer to 1; it's no coincidence that the density of water and the strength of Earth's gravitation field are both nearly round multiples of SI units at Earth's surface. We already set the density of water to 1 (as a physicist would put it), but then we set the speed of light to 1. I say that instead, we should set the strength of Earth's gravitational field to 1. We can even add a Force column that gives the weight of an object with a certain mass, on Earth's surface.

A more radical idea: Since the Energy column serves only to store measurements in electron volts, which are used just as often as a measurement of mass, remove the Energy column and stick the electron volts into the mass column in the places where they're typically used. As anybody that groks special relativity can tell you, rest mass and rest energy are different names for precisely the same thing. (BTW, I've only ever see "electron volt" abbreviated as "eV", never "E V" as on the temp page. Was somebody trigger happy with the search and replace?)

A typical row:

Time	Length	Area	Volume	Mass	Force
1 s	1 dm	100 cm²	1 L	1 kg	10 N

All human sized, because this is a human sized row.

So what is the relationship between a second and a decimetre? Make a pendulum clock out of a decimetre stick and see for yourself ^_^. — Toby 15:21 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

Using the chain pages

There seem to be two ways to link the chain pages in use:

137 metres (link the number and the unit separately)
137 metres (joint link)

I see both as having advatages and disadvantages: I'm not sure type (1) makes it clear that the linked number will tell the reader about units and their values: it could be assuemd it's just about big numbers. (2) on the other hand doesn't give immediate information about the unit itself -- though that information is on the chain page, with a link to the unit there, and sometimes in the form of "100 km is x miles". Thoughts on this? It would be a good idea to stick to one type. mav seems to prefer (1). I lean towards (2), but I'm pretty much undecided. -- Tarquin

What I have been doing is using (1) upon the first occurrence of both a order of mag and unit and using (2) when a different order of mag using the same unit is found later in an article. That way we avoid having 137 metre, which at first glance looks like 137 AD. The reason I like linking to the units is because one of the main reasons we have the unit articles is for comparing and relating units. The orders of mag are, of course, here to compare the different sizes of things. Both are important and direct links to them where appropriate should exist in articles (first occurrence only -- unless there is a table. See atomic radius in beryllium). --mav

Sounds good to me. Once the shift to the new names is done, I'll write up the salient points of the chains, the name format & how to link to them on the Manual of Style pages -- Tarquin

Also, another thing I do when I don't know which orders of mag page to link is first link the unit, hit preview and then navigate to the correct orders of mag page (I might have to use the online converter to find the correct SI scale). --mav

I definitely think that #2 is better. The first time that I saw something like "137 metres", I had no idea what the heck was going on until I let my mouse hover over the links (and my browser told me what page was being linked to). Even after seeing that, I often do a double take when I see this strange thing happening — it looks so much like somebody has inadvertently linked to a year. On the other hand, "137 metres" (or "137 m", depending on whether or not you want to abbreviate in the running text) is perfectly clear. The link will surely discuss how long 137 m is, and you can reasonably expect to find a link to metre there if that's what you really want. What you should expect to find behind the "137" is a mystery to the newcomer. — Toby 05:11 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

Hm - I just reset my prefs to show underlines and agree that the separate links do look odd. However I've already gone about linking many units directly without orders of mag links and many others with both linked. But the joint links should work just as well. The main function of the unit articles was for conversion purposes and there will be links to the unit articles in each order of mag article and there already are links to online converters. We will have to beef-up the order of mag articles a bit more to make this work, but I was planning on this anyway. --mav

I doubt that it's vital to fix each case so that it has the preferred linkage, at least not to fix the version 1 links, which may be confusing but do work. But version 2 is what I'd prefer, and what I've been making those few times that I've had call to. BTW, whatever is decided, when the time comes to do massive gruntwork like moving the order of magnitude titles to their canonical names, let me know here or on my talk page. I'm behind in my Wikipedia duties, but something that can be done for a short while between breaks wouldn't be a difficult way for me to earn my keep. — Toby 07:56 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

If we choose (2) for link style, it'll get a metnion on the Manual of Style -- in other words, all the links will eventually be fixed. No rush though. For a progress report on name canonization, see Orders of magnitude/Temp. Mav and I have done m, m^2, m^3 chains. About a third of the way through the kg chain. -- Tarquin 11:13 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

I also prefer (2) over (1) since (1) is simply illogical. Every link should be self-explanatory and we shouldn't force people to "try out" links. Since the order-of-magnitude pages have links to the units, that's only one click away anyway.

Personally, I sometimes use

(3a) 137 metres (see 1 E2 m for a list of objects of comparable size)

This is crystal clear, if more verbose. AxelBoldt

(3b)I like your idea Axel but instead of all the extra text why not simply write; 137 metres * or 137 m *? Then at the bottom of the page or table have your statement once. Although if there is only one orders of mag link in the article then the verbose option would be best. --mav

the old pages

The old-style names redirects still exist; IMO they should be deleted. I doubt they are Google material, so they're not really useful, and may even confuse. -- Tarquin

Even though I usually hate deleting redirects I think that in this case their existence will lead to more confusion than anything else. This shouldn't be too big of a deal for those outside of Wikipedia since these pages haven't been used that much. In the end all links will be changed to the new syntax. The second best solution would be to create redirects for all major valid alternatives so that most everything works. --mav

What can be gained by deleting the redirects? Isn't the whole idea to make linking easy? Forcing people to check every time which convention of the day we currently prefer for orders-of-magnitude pages seems to be counterproductive. All reasonable conventions should continue to work. AxelBoldt

The way it is now there are three ways to links to many but not all of the orders of mag articles. We must therefore either create redirects so that each orders of mag article can be linked in a few different ways or we delete the current redirects. Either way works for me -- although since many orders of mag article have yet to be written, it is a bit much to ask that each person making a new one has to create several redirects. I guess that's why we have Wikipediaholics like me... If nobody else does it, I will. --mav

I agree with Axel. Whenever I create a page, I always try to think of likely alternative names for redirects. I think that it's just good policy to make linking easy. We have naming conventions, not linking conventions. (My smart-ass quote for the day ^_^.) BTW, I guess that I'm going to work on some order of time magnitude pages soon. — Toby 05:14 Sep 19, 2002 (UTC)

Next Steps

Now the the existing orders of mag articles and templates are moved to their new (hopefully semi-permanent) homes I now propose the format for each should be something similar to 1 E-10 m. In this entry I am using the SI prefix before the SI primary unit as the primary way to express the unit. In this case that is nanometres and picometres. Non-standard metric units, in this case the Angstrom, would be within the comparisons list along with non-SI units. SI prefixes will be able to go fairly high (1 E24) and fairly low (1 E-24) and should cover most everything. What does everybody else think? --mav

Sounds good. Though I'm confused about " 225 pm (0.33 nm) ". I think having another number in parentheses on each line is a little heavy on the eye. On several pages, I've put all the "unit conversions" and "pure geometric" stuff in an indented list: see 1 E6 m². -- Tarquin 10:33 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

I agree - there is no reason to have two SI units right next to each other. That was a left-over from the previous version of the article in which Angstroms were the primary unit and nm were in parens. It should be * 225 pm (0.225 nm) to be factually correct -- yet another artifact of my hasty conversions. -- mav

Mav's evil suggestion

Evil question; Would the syntax E11 m be better? That way one could simply say that 1 AU is equal to 150 E11 m. Yes, I know this is ultra evil but I just thought of it. At this point I guess I will have to settle for redirects since so much work has been done moving these articles around twice already. :) --mav

... yes, that's ultra evil. But I don't think many readers will understand what "150 E11 m" means in the text. I'm tempted to say "sure, we'll combine it with an effort to convert all the floating tables to full-width." ... ;-) -- Tarquin

Not to add evilness on top of evilness, but isn't 1 E11 m just one of E11 whole number values within the E11 order of magnitude range? I'm starting to get a bad feeling about the "1 E" syntax and I volunteer to spend an entire day fixing this myself but I won't do so unless you agree that it would be a logical thing to do. Otherwise I will just make a bunch of redirects (But I have no proplem with spending the time to fix this if it is in fact best for the articles). But I do think we should have the least ambiguous and most informative syntax as the place where the articles reside. Again, I am sorry for the evilness of this, but this has been something that has been confusing me ever since I first saw these pages back in Feb '02. Until yesterday I couldn't put my finger on exactly why the syntax was confusing me other than the obviously ambiguous lowercase "e". I think I have already mentioned that I have a math dyslexia. Unless numbers and equations are very clear I get lost. The E11 m syntax just seems to be the most logical and easy to work with to me. What do you think? --mav

This is one to ponder... I'm innumerate so between us we're maybe not best suited to working on these pages. (seriously. within 6 months of starting my maths degree I had clean forgotten my multiplication tables: being a mathematician, the only numbers I ever need are 0, 1, e, pi and infinity.) I've been unsure about the "1 E" too. Another point is that "1 E11" is numbers from 1E11 to 1E12, not including the 12, but I think we really don't want to start thinking of "1 E11 m - 1 E12 m", it'll be difficult to work with, and besides, thinking about it, the adding of an extra digit is the obvious cut-off point, and that's what we currently have -- so scratch that particular can of worms before we even open it.

Removing the "1" would allow "transparent" links in pages if we wanted them, like "138 E13 m" -- do we want those? Some extreme siszes maybe, but for everyday stuff like the surface area of Lake Titicaca, it's best to use SI multiples like MegaWatt, Hectare, etc.

The other point you raise is a clean, clear page title. I agree, the "1" bugs me in some way I can't quantify. I think we need to hassle the scientist Wikipedians who actually use this notation in real life (again). -- Tarquin

Yeah, you are probably right about having to bug Axel and crew again (their eyes are going to role, I know it). Since I'm not working as a real scientist right now I can't say I use the E or even standard scientific/engineering notation in real life but I have been using it in the elements articles. In fact I have been using the E notation often lately since doing so saves a lot of horizontal space (the element tables are mostly in SI so use the same standard units we are using here). The more I think about it the more I like the E11 m notation. Most importantly I can see myself easily using this in many articles (granted, most of the time it will be sublinked under prefixed units like kilometers, but having the option of creating direct free-links where appropriate is nice). If I only thought of this a month ago. Fixing all these pages twice already was a great deal of work, but simply removing a "1" and a space from each shouldn't take me nearly as much time as it took both of us to do the previous conversions. --mav

Slight problem: E1, E2 are already redirects, and one possible plan was to do a chain of dimensionless numbers. (There's also an EEC thing called the E111, but I don't think it exists anymore.) I think we should wait a while to get all the sciency wikipedians' opinions. -- Tarquin 23:42 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Waiting to form consensus seems to be the best thing to do -- we aren't the only ones that will be using these articles. Since I don't even pretend to be a mathematician I'm not sure what the value would be about having dimensionless number articles. What more can you say about E12 other than it is a range of numbers from 1,000,000,000,000 and 999,999,999,999,999.9999.....? The redirect examples are just cases of disambiguation. In my opinion E1 and E2 are way too ambiguous for their current purpose and can be taken over by us if we place disambiguation blocks at the bottom of the resulting orders of mag articles (fixing the current links of course). --mav

OK I see. Number of human hairs type of thing. Yes that would be neat. --mav

Since there is talk about renaming the articles again, here are my thoughts: pretty much everything can be accomplished with redirects, except for the actually displayed title of the article. So that one should be as descriptive as possible. In that light, I think "E10 m" is worse than "1 E10 m", but both are pretty bad. The optimal title would be "Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m". That would explain it completely. You'd link to it via redirects such as "E10 m" or "1e10 m" or what have you.

Oh, and one thing about the "E10" notation: a link such as 53 E10 m is not correct, since we want to link to "E11 m" in that situation. And readers have probably more trouble with the E's than with powers of 10. AxelBoldt 04:46 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths between 1 E10 m and 1 E11 m is a bit wordy but this is the least ambiguous title. Howver, since this is a long name I don't forsee that systax being linked directly much (except from unit articles). Redirects should work fine in most cases. I will try to think of something better than your idea and if that isn't successful then I can start moving the articles and fixing any double redirects. Hopefully we've got this right this time. --mav

You could at least shorten the words a bit. Say Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m, or even Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m?

What was it about that can of worms that didn't say "don't go there"? *sigh* It's maybe clearer to call them "Lengths from A to B", but it's more technically correct to say "1E1 m", since the way the system works is up from a new power of ten. Axel's absolutely right to correct me: "53 E10 m" is incorrect. You can only use numbers from 1 up to 9.9999 for each slice, so I think it makes sense to name the page after the base number. I'm feeling terribly ambivalent about it now. Wish I hadn't brought it up! (BTW, I like Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m if we do go for that style) -- Tarquin

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m would be fine with me; Lengths 1E10 - 1E11 m seems a little less self-evident, and since nobody will use these links directly anyway, a bit of wordiness in the interest of clarity cannot hurt. After all, the title of the article is what Google and our search engine indexes and displays. AxelBoldt 18:42 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m gets my vote too. Not too wordy and not too vague. --mav 19:04 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)

Actually I think the current page titles are fine. They could still be moved to Lengths from 1E10 to 1E11 m format but I now don't think this is that important given the amount of work involved. If however, double redirects could get automatically fixed then a move might be in order if somebody is so inclined to do so. We should go live with what we have now, me thinks. --mav

It occurs to me that we should never say something like "5 E 22 m" in an article's text, since printed material says "5 × 10²² m" when it's capable — and HTML has been thus capable since the days of Netscape 2. Note that this doesn't affect article titles, which can't handle superscripts; "E" notation is standard in a superscriptless environment. But it does mean that we won't have free links like "5 E22 m". — Toby 16:07 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

I've noticed that sometimes when people edit articles containing the superscript-2 character (as opposed to its HTML encoding, ² or ²) it seems to automatically get translated into a normal 2 by their browsers (it's either that or they reflexively change it into a normal character, an understandable reaction IMO :). I think all area pages of the form 1 E14 m² should have redirects from the associated 1 E14 m2 page. Bryan

I've spotted this particular browser bug very occasionally on other occasions. It's an argument for always using the HTML character entity (ampersand) encoding, instead of the Latin-1 character directly. Although I agree that redirects of this sort are very wise, note that it's quite possible to make a link using them ([[1 E14 m²]] = 1 E14 m²). — Toby 14:24 Nov 17, 2002 (UTC)

One note, though: The ² looks much better typographically than <sup>2</sup> since at least on my browser the first one does not add extra leading but the second one adds one extra half blank line which is quite disturbing. So for m² I would suggest using the HTML character form.

One other thing: Has anyone ever seen the Mm unit outside of Wikipedia? I have not, so I suggest we use 10³ km instead. -- Egil 09:40 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Once: http://hem.fyristorg.com/ojarnef/fys/metric-units-comp.txt It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember this guy doesn't like scientific notation very much, and would like to see some extra prefixes added so that we can write Planck's constant as 0.105 vJ·s. I think we should go with 10³ km. -- Tim Starling 22:56 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Google gives a reasonable amount of hits for megameter, most of which refer to some astronomical instrument but many of which refer to the unit. The correct SI spelling only gets about 200 hits. It's not a very common unit over here, but then, I never saw centilitres until I went to France, and then they were everywhere.

I've made a template for orders of magnitude; if I'm mistaken and one already exists, I'd love a pointer to it. -- JohnOwens 08:05 Mar 26, 2003 (UTC)

Nice work! It's been ages since I've done any work on these entries and I'm glad they haven't been forgotten. --mav

I'm noticing that, admittedly, a lot of the examples I'm using for energy are really just an amount of power over an arbitrary period of time. So register your objections here, if any, or a power column gets added in a couple of days. -- JohnOwens 23:41 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)