[ExI] Eternity: Our Next Billion Years, by Michael Hanlon

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 12:31 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> See Wikipedia:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales>
> UK usage
>    "Billion" has meant 10^9 in most sectors of official published
> writing for many years now. The UK government, BBC, and most other
> broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale
> exclusively in all contexts since the mid 1970s.

It may be of interest that AFAIK in *all* neolatin languages, 10^9 is
a milliard, and a billion is one thousand milliard.

Thus, the old British usage is not so isolated, after all... :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj