On 3/5/2012 10:12 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> To most people, "million", "billion" and "trillion" are almost
>> interchangeable terms.
>
>> But you know what? As far as I can tell, almost nobody mixes up a
>> kilowatt and a megawatt.
>
>    In the same way as nobody mixes up a thousand and a million.

Echoes my thoughts exactly; a thousand-fold difference "mentally" 
matters much more for smaller numbers.  I'd imagine that mix-ups 
between, say,  megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes are as common as 
those between million, billion, and trillion.  It's also a bit rare that 
I see either of these errors, so I don't know where Invisible got the 
"to most people" aspect, although surveys testing the general public's 
math knowledge tend to be scary enough that I suppose it's possible.

One error I *do* see all the time though, is a misuse of the term 
"exponential" to mean anything superlinear (or just "a lot").  In 
informal conversation it's a little grating, but sort of ok since it's a 
relatively standard use of the word.  When grading physics labs, 
however, I saw parabolas called "exponential" more often than I saw them 
called anything correct, and it drove my absolutely bonkers.

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