Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/02/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]2003-02-24-17:12:58 Austin Franklin: > Er, OK, I know I didn't ask specifically what it was, and asked if you knew > WHAT it was...so I'll be more specific this time. What IS "an order of > magnitude"? H'mm... is he joking, or does he actually want someone to answer? Everybody knows this, right? Okay, I'll bite. It's a factor of ten. A hundred and a thousand are one order of magnitude apart; ten and a thousand are two orders of magnitude different. For those of us who used to play scientists on TV or elsewhere, and thus spent a lot of time using numbers in scientific notation, there's an order of magnitude difference per difference in the 10s exponent; it's the same thing. H'mm. Maybe everybody doesn't know this -- I'm now recalling having run across some pretty imprecise uses of the term. It's right up there with those who haven't a clue what "decimate" means (remove -- originally, kill -- one tenth of a population) yet insist on using it with great drama. - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html