Cloud cuckoo land

[catgate]

A couple of days ago I saw a report that said the disgraceful business in Iraq had, up to the end of March, cost over £3.1 billion. I have just checked and found that the population of this septic isle has just gone over 60 million. This means that every man, woman and child has spent, or is debt to the tune of, over £50,000 each on this venture. Where has reality gone?

[deuces wild]

A very small price to pay to ensure your children, your children's children....and so on will be free from terrorists who want all westerns dead, including you.

[-pops-]

Are we talking new billions or old ones? A thousand million or a million million? 1,000,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000?

[catgate]

I should have pointed out that these figures are purely British costs (issued by MOD) and since they are British figures I assume they are quoted using the British Billion (ie a million million).

[expertec]

Um... no. There is no British billion now.

A billion is a thousand million anywhere in the world.

[-pops-]

Whichever, it is an amount which I would have preferred to go elsewhere.

[catgate]

Um... no. There is no British billion now.

A billion is a thousand million anywhere in the world.

Just picked this up on the 'net :-

How Many? A Dictionary of Units of Measurement

© Russ Rowlett and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Table of Contents

About the Dictionary

Using the Dictionary

Names for Large Numbers

The English names for large numbers are coined from the Latin names for small numbers n by adding the ending -illion suggested by the name "million." Thus billion and trillion are coined from the Latin prefixes bi- (n = 2) and tri- (n = 3), respectively. In the American system for naming large numbers, the name coined from the Latin number n applies to the number 103n+3. In a system traditional in many European countries, the same name applies to the number 106n.

In particular, a billion is 109 = 1 000 000 000 in the American system and 1012 = 1 000 000 000 000 in the European system. For 109, Europeans say "thousand million" or "milliard."

In my understanding the reason for numbers was to give a precise value to quantity, thus avoiding the inevitable mix up when only using the word "some". This leads me to wonder "why the American need to overstate?"

I can understand the need for governments to create smoke screens, and to facilitate this a new method of calculating "one billion" has been put foreward in his book "Toward more Creative Accounting for Governments" by Herb J Throgheimer III jnr. :-

First take the name of the country. We will use Albania as an example,

Lay out the letters and asign them a value based on alphabetical position.

A.. L.. B.. A.. N.. I.. A

1. 12..2.. 1.. 14. 9.. 1

Next add/mutliply/subtract/devide randomly some or all of these numbers.

Follow this by appending to the resulant number a handfull of Zeros and sprinkle in a few commas.

The result is the National Standard billion.

[dadyassa]

Just to confuse things, in Spain.

a thousand is a mil.

a million is un millon.

a billion is millon de millones.

[-pops-]

Whatever this figure really is, I resent one fraction of a penny of my money going towards this fatuous, unwinnable, illegal invasion of a sovereign state.

[andsome]

A very small price to pay to ensure your children, your children's children....and so on will be free from terrorists who want all westerns dead, including you.

I think we can be satisfied now that Iraq had very little to do with International terrorism. I think Saddam was too busy persecuting his own people to bother with supporting international terrorism. The main culprits appear to be Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, together with the remnants of the Taliban in Afghanistan.