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Talk:Order of magnitude/Archive 1

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

I think that both SI units and SI prefixes (excluding 10-2, 10-1, 101, 102, whatever they are) should be used. We can say 1 Mm2, 1000 km2 or 1 x 106 m2. But we must be consistent across all the different orders of magnitude pages.

So hectares, antpower etc should not be allowed but m, km, etc should be allowed because they are really all SI units. Brianjd 07:47, 2004 Jun 15 (UTC)

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

Suggestions for new chains

 * speeds

What about orders of magnitude for temeratures? In kelvin, obvisouly, with Celsius (and god forbid, Fahrenheit) equivalents in each decade article. Should not be as limited as one might imagine. Quite interesting things happen when approaching absolute zero, I understand. Tempertures required for nuclear fusion would make an interesting span (and I'm sure there are some Big Bang exotica that could make this even more interesting. -- Egil 17:17 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

 * good idea. but let's move this bit to Talk:Orders of magnitude (new chains) -- page getting too long -- Tarquin 17:24 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

OK. There is now a demo chain at 1 E2 K, extending in both directions. It has not been linked anywhere.

I think the concept is OK, but I'm not perfectly happy with the layout. The Celsius equivalents mess things up. I tried a table layout, but it was so-and-so too (see below). Perhaps there is some aligment that can make it better? -- Egil 18:57 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Alternative style:

I can see maybe capitalizing the first word of each example, but I really don't think the names of elements & compounds ought to be capitalized. Any objections if I dash through and chop them down? -- John Owens 19:03 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

 * No, please do. It was my fault (I somehow had this idea that the names of the elements were proper nouns).

 * Another thing: The temperatures are not inserted in the orders of magnitudes yet. I have no idea where they would fit. One suggestion (from temperatures) is to equate 1 eV to 11573 K (i.e. 1 E4 K) since this corresponds to the average kinetic energy at that temperature. Is that too weird?
 * -- Egil 19:24 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Anyone have a good idea how small this should go? It seems to me that most of the really small powers are better expressed as energy, when you have reactions of individual molecules and such. I know some LEDs and such go at least down to microwatts, and there's the now-infamous (there's that word again!) antpower, albeit badly calculated. Anybody know any nanowatts or smaller that have any use? Perhaps the average power output of a single human cell, or something like that? -- John Owens 10:38 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Using the chain pages
There seem to be two ways to link the chain pages in use: 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
 * 1)  137 metres (link the number and the unit separately)
 * 2) 137 metres (joint link)

 * 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

Format (2) is definitely better than format (1). With a link like "137" on its own, you expect it to give information on the number 137 (Wikipedia has articles like that I believe?). Brianjd 07:53, 2004 Jun 15 (UTC)

Creating this page with talk from Talk:Orders of magnitude to get it below 32k. -- John Owens 23:09 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Exponential notation in page names
I think I might be guilty of the 1e-15 notation, so I'd better give a comment. The reason that I started to name pages like that is because there were pages named 100000000km² and it was very hard for me to count all those zeros. Yes, introducing commas might have solved the same problem. Furthermore, however, km² (for square kilometres) might be useful for the sizes of countries, but not for the sizes of paper sheets, so it was clear that a consistent system that spanned the entire range of sizes could not be based on km². One idea, as has been mentioned here, is to use different units for different parts of the spectrum, but this makes knowing/guessing the page name for a given size even harder than the "e" notation. I think that most Wikipedia contributors restrict their contributions to their own field of speciality (religion, science fiction literature, physics, medieval music, ...) and that those who find joy in arranging these order of magnitude pages will know the "e" notation. Those who merely read these pages, really need not worry about the page names. I think it shows now that the expansion of this system into m3, kg, J, s, and perhaps other units proves that it is useful. However, I'm not stopping anybody from renaming the pages or creating redirect aliases. I have no hard feelings about this. I think this was a funny game, an interesting new invention. It wasn't there until somebody invented it, and nobody told us how to do. I'm a strong believer in the try-watch-learn-redo approach. The current system is a try.--LA2, November 27, 2001.

The use of the lowercase "e" in these entries is completely wrong. Lowercase "e" is the notation of the natural logarithm -- Capital "E" is the correct shorthand used in scientific notation to denote the × 10^ in n × 10y. I will move these to the correct capitalization in the next few days unless somebody can convince me that this is not a good idea. --mav

 * Go for it. I'll put links back to metre from each 1e-11 m-type page -- Tarquin 09:13 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)

OK, I have fixed all the links and edit links and will be working on that version at Orders of magnitude/Temp. --mav

 * I've just noticed that --April uses lowercase e on her Simple Science wiki: http://www.renaissoft.com/april/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Exponential_Notation

 * Maybe that is where this came from. Anyway capital "E" is far better even if some people do use lowercase "e" for this; otherwise there is confusion as to whether e is a shorthand for × 10n or if the e stands for e which is the base to the natural logarithm. In either case, the lack of spaces between the characters is just plain wrong no matter what and m3 is not nearly as clear as m³. --mav

 * Aha, I've found your evil hidden plot, Mav! Ahem. I was under the impression that including spaces was incorrect. Certainly it looks very very wrong to my eyes. --Brion
 * Looks fine to me -- is there a ref. for how this is supposed to be done? I've just been expanding on the example Axel placed in scientific notation (which conforms to the way I've always seen the shorthand notation). --mav

 * I've never seen em with spaces. My experience of E-notation is overwhelmingly no spaces, and usually with an explicit + sign for positive numbers. I've been looking for some kind of official standard either way, all I can find is notes about number formatting functions in computer languages and spreadsseets (invariably without spaces), or notes for people taking standardized tests that they should not use spaces in their scientific notation. Proper scientific notation, of course, would use superscripts, but we can't put those in titles. --Brion

Hm. Knowing that others do not use spaces would have been useful info back when I started this process. However its a bit late now. Besides, not having the spaces doesn't work at all for me for negative exponents; 1E-10 m looks way too crowded; gives the impression that "E" is a variable and that "-" indicates subtraction. What do you think? --mav

 * Had I known you were going to blindly rename a gazillion pages on dubious grounds, I would have squealed earlier. ;) 1E-10 m looks fairly normal, though 1e-10 m looks even better. *cough cough* On the other hand, 1 E -10 m looks... bizarre. It looks like there were supposed to be more characters and somebody accidentally deleted them.  --Brion

 * As was stated before the lowerecase e is wrong. Thus the change. Everything else really is more of a matter of personal taste. I will stop moving additional entries for a while and concentrate on improving the content. --mav

 * 10E-10? Guess not.  It would be interesting to see how that parsed in a browser's location bar....  --KQ

 * If we could use superscripts, we'd just use 1×10-10... --Brion

 * I frequently miss the obvious. --KQ

 * Me too! We should invite it over more often. --Brion

 * That's a good one. --KQ

I just asked Axel to weigh-in on the issue here. If Axel agrees with Brion that the spaces should go then I move the articles myself and fix the links. --mav

 * Well, so much pressure! I definitely like E better than e, mainly because most calculators use E, and everybody else uses exponential notation anyway. Regarding the space issue I don't have strong opinions and could live with both solutions, but If I were completely free to choose, I'd tend towards writing them without spaces. AxelBoldt

 * I just found this from Axel's talk page. I use a lowercase letter, no spaces, and no plus sign. (Does that mean that I liked them how they were originally?) I don't see any grounds for calling any convention wrong; they're all just half assed attempts to do without superscripts, and we should have every likely format, with redirects. — Toby 16:03 Aug 21, 2002 (PDT)

Hm. What to do. Over half of the articles and links are in the [1 E n unit] format. It also appears that there are several valid ways to express this notation which includes the now dominant form. Since Axel doesn't think the spaces should be removed (only has a highly qualified preference) I say that I should continue with the format I was working with (this represents far less work). That is unless somebody feels strongly enough about the no space notation to help with the moving. --mav

I don't think it matters so much what the article title is, since I find them all acceptable. My big deal is that redirects should be made for all of the notations that have been tried in the past (and are thus likely to be tried in the future). I'll help with that; let me know what I should do. — Toby 21:02 Aug 22, 2002 (PDT)

 * That'll be messy. We should agree on one format for these, and edit links to be in that format as and when we find them: consistency. A page on dates and numbers in the Manual of Style, maybe? -- Tarquin

 * Messy though it may be, I think that it (bunches of redirects) is necessary if we want Wikipedia to work proprerly. Casual users won't read Manual of Style first and may not notice the subtle difference (as opposed to naming conventions about, say, royalty, which aren't very subtle). This certainly doesn't mean that we can't also edit links when we find them, to help copycats do it right the first time. We should use every tool that we have available. — Toby 11:34 Aug 24, 2002 (PDT)

 * I think Tarquin just wanted to have consistency in what we name each order of mag main article. I for one will make sure redirects exist for reasonable capital E spacing variants (the only redirects that I will maintain for the lowercase variants are the old page titles -- the only reason is for backwards compatibility for external search engines and visitors who may have bookmarked the pages). However I will also change each and every current link to the orders of mag articles to point directly to whatever we decide is the best syntax (see below). --mav

I may have found a way to do this that will satify everyone: Why not have a space after the first number and no space after the E. For example; 1 E4 m. Compare this to 1E4 m and 1 E 4 m Here is an example for negative values; 1 E-13 m. Compared with 1E-13 m and 1 E -13 m. I for one actually prefer the newer syntax becuase it is nicely balanced and easy to read. Brion is right, having spaces between everything is distracting and looks odd -- this new syntax look much better to me. --mav

 * I'm reasonably satisfied with the negatives, but now the positives look unbalanced. :) I'd recommend considering 1 E+4 m, but +s don't work in titles. (Probably hearkens back to the days of raw URLs, since a + is a special character in a URL; however this can be fixed with escaping, so I suspect it could be changed.) But if nobody likes that enough to fix the software, go ahead with your plan. --Brion

 * Just for reference (stuff got lost a bit in the refactoring of all this talk), the final consensus is: "1 E2 {unit symbol}" and "1 E-2 {unit symbol}". For example: "1 E20 m" and "1 E-20 m". I plan on doing some grunt work bit by bit. I'll set up a template too. -- Tarquin 21:04 Sep 9, 2002 (UTC)

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

"1 En m" → "1 E+n m"
In the scientific notation, often explicitly mentioning the plus sign is being preferred. Hence the article names were changed, while of course the former names redirect to the new ones. All redirects that existed were appropriately modified. The shortest range, which used to end at 1 E-13 m, was extended till 1 E-24 m (the yoctometre, being the shortest subdivision of the metre in the SI system), and the Order of magnitude table now also shows that shortest range. Kind regards. — SomeHuman 25 Mar2007 11:32 (UTC)

Template

 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Time
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Length
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Area
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Volume
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Mass
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Energy
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Power
 * Talk:Order of magnitude/template/Temperature

To the templates below, between "Less" and "More", actual entries are added, one bullet point for each entry. The entries should be according to the following format:

 * 102 g -- small apple, see joule

A double dash separates the value from the explanation, and the explanation is not capitalized.

To help compare different orders of magnitude we list here (dimensions) between 10undefined (units) and 10undefined (units).

 * (Less)
 * (More)

External link

 * Conversion Calculators

To help compare different orders of magnitude we list here (dimensions) between 10undefined (units) and 10undefined (units).

* (Less) * (More)

== External link == *Conversion Calculators

(copied from Talk:Orders of magnitude) -- John Owens

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)

http://www.ex.ac.uk/cimt/res2/calcs/calaindx.htm has moved to http://www.ex.ac.uk/trol/scol/index.htm so I've changed all the links I could find. -Wikibob | Talk 15:04, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)

 * Maybe we should just remove it from the various pages or place it on a template .. -- Oddly it's allover. -- User:Docu

Creating this sub-page to cut down on the size of Talk:Order of magnitude. -- John Owens 22:56 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Question of style
The various "nn Enn xx" pages seem to use at least two different styles of capitalization (approx 50-50 distribution):

Style 1:

 * Lighter masses
 * 102 g -- Small apple, see joule

Style 2:

 * lighter masses
 * 102 g -- small apple, see joule

For consistency, I think we should decide one of these styles, but which one? Or has this been decided somewhere. -- Egil 08:41 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

 * Probably this would be the right place for this, so I copied it here. I agree it should be consistent, no strong feelings one way or the other, but I guess I would actually prefer an intermediate style:

 * Style 3:

 * Lighter masses
 * 102 g -- small apple, see joule

 * but maybe that's just me. -- John Owens 08:50 Apr 9, 2003 (UTC)

 * I agree that style 3 has merit in terms of being logical (if we assume the "sentence" starts at "102"). I will change to style 3 as I add new entries (don't have the time to go through all articles, I think). -- Egil 07:00 Apr 13, 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:Order of magnitude/Archive 1


text:
Projective differential geometry

In mathematics, projective differential geometry is the study of differential geometry, from the point of view of properties of mathematical objects such as functions, diffeomorphisms, and submanifolds, that are invariant under transformations of the projective group. This is a mixture of the approaches from Riemannian geometry of studying invariances, and of the Erlangen program of characterizing geometries according to their group symmetries.

The area was much studied by mathematicians from around 1890 for a generation (by J. G. Darboux, George Henri Halphen, Ernest Julius Wilczynski, E. Bompiani, G. Fubini, Eduard Čech, amongst others), without a comprehensive theory of differential invariants emerging. Élie Cartan formulated the idea of a general projective connection, as part of his method of moving frames; abstractly speaking, this is the level of generality at which the Erlangen program can be reconciled with differential geometry, while it also develops the oldest part of the theory (for the projective line), namely the Schwarzian derivative, the simplest projective differential invariant.

Further work from the 1930s onwards was carried out by J. Kanitani, Shiing-Shen Chern, A. P. Norden, G. Bol, S. P. Finikov and G. F. Laptev. Even the basic results on osculation of curves, a manifestly projective-invariant topic, lack any comprehensive theory. The ideas of projective differential geometry recur in mathematics and its applications, but the formulations given are still rooted in the language of the early twentieth century.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Projective differential geometry


text:
Sha Tin Town Hall

Sha Tin Town Hall is a town hall at the town centre of the Sha Tin District in Hong Kong. It is located near Sha Tin station, Sha Tin Park and New Town Plaza. It is part of the podium complex which includes the Sha Tin Town Hall, Sha Tin Public Library and the Sha Tin Marriage Registry.

The facility was formerly governed by the Regional Council but has been transferred to the jurisdiction of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

History
The Sha Tin Town Hall opened in January 1987.

title: Sha Tin Town Hall


text:
Stamna, Greece

Stamna (Σταμνά) is a village and a community in the municipal unit of Aitoliko in the southern part of Aetolia-Acarnania, Greece. It is located on a chain of low hills that separate the river Acheloos to the west from the bay of Aitoliko to the southeast. It is 6 km south of Angelokastro, 11 km northwest of Aitoliko, 17 km southwest of Agrinio and 21 km northwest of Missolonghi. The Ionia Odos motorway (Missolonghi - Amfilochia) passes east of the village. The community Stamna consists of the villages Stamna, Stathmos Stamnas (1.5 km east, near the former railway station) and Kefalovrysos (4 km southeast, at the bay). Stamna had a train station on the former railway from Missolonghi to Agrinio.

title: Stamna, Greece


text:
Talk:Order of magnitude/Archive 2

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.
 * Add power, since many of the energy entries are really just "so much power" over "so much time". -- John Owens... hey, why are you looking at me like that?
 * 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

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 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

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.  --User: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. --User: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:

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)

--

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

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 &sup2; looks much better typographically than 2 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.

Template
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)

Too small
Is there any reason to include entries below 1_E-19_m? It serves no purpose other than adding confusion, as fas as I can see. When/if science enters this realm, the table can always be extended. -- Egil 07:38 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

 * Well Planck's length is at 1 E-35 m... I don't see how it would be confusing to fill the gap between that and measurable lengths. --mav

 * Sure, but what are you going to fill it with? Other than just '10n' over and over again. -- John Owens

 * Agreed. The entire point of the sub-articles for various orders of magnitude is that you can compare things of the same magnitude. 15 empty articles between 10-19 and 10-35 does not serve any purpose... -- Egil 08:28 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Tens vs thousands
It suddenly struck me: For very high masses and energy levels, it would make a lot of sense to make articles covering thousands instead of tens, wouldn't it? I've done it for high temperatures, and it seems to make sense. -- Egil 06:56 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

 * I would thus suggest making articles for thousands for other extremes too. Also, just like years are used for long durations and light years for long distances, I would suggest using kWh for energy levels above 106 J. That would make it easier for people to relate to and understand these energy levels. -- Egil 07:43 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)

 * I'm having second thoughts about this one; it's reasonable up to a point, but then in the even higher energy levels, you're looking at number usually associated only with astronomical phenomena, which would usually be given in joules. Perhaps use the various Wh between 1 E6 J/1 Wh and 1 E22 J/1 E7 TWh points, and joules both above and below that? I'd also be willing to see both listed within that range; I think there's enough width to spare in the table that it wouldn't crowd it too much.
 * Also, I think I'd rather see 1 Wh than 0.001 kWh. Just looks neater, and Wh is hardly unheard of. -- John Owens 18:42, 2003 Oct 25 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Watt-second is in common use, but not Wh. Egil

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE
STOP adding arbritary prefixes to SI units. PLEASE only use prefixes that are in common, scientific, use. Constructions like Zettaseconds and Megameter are just that, constructions. They are not commonly understood, add only confusion, and additionally makes what is supposed to be an encyclopedia look like a product of some juvenile word game. -- Egil 13:15 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

 * On the other hand, just a decade ago, you could have said much the same about the prefix "giga", and nowadays it's very commonly used, although almost entirely in the area of computer storage (I sometimes see it used with Watts, too). -- John Owens 22:51 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

 * Yes, giga and tera has been in common use for watt, watt hours and electron volts for as long as I can remember.
 * But the important issue is: The encyclopedia should reflect the current state of affairs, not seek to introduce new and unknown terms. For an influential encyclopedia there might be an aspect of a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle, obviously. -- Egil

Title
Are you aware of the following entry Magnitude comparison? Can you find a better title (my proposal is too long: Order of magnitude comparisons of distance)? -- looxix 23:14 Apr 19, 2003 (UTC)

 * Order of magnitude - length maybe? Just move Magnitude comparison to whatever title you want. -- Tarquin 09:07 Apr 20, 2003 (UTC)

 * Is the Order of magnitude - length really required? It seems like duplicated information and effort to me. -- Egil 14:33 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

 * Agreed, all the different dimensions have their links up in the top section. I'll take that one out, but I think it might be nicer to have them in a list format instead; I'll see if that can be worked in nicely while I'm at it. -- John Owens 15:25 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)
 * Oops - Order of magnitude - length is actually a different page than Orders of magnitude (length). :p Now I'm not so sure what to do about that link. -- John Owens 15:28 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)

Order of magnitude for frequency
I frankly don't see the need for these, because they are merely expressing the same property as time. I suggest all (now open) magnitude of Hz be redirected to the relevant times. As I test I've redirected 1 E6 Hz to 1 E-7 s (not -6, because of the decade greater or equal convention). -- Egil 14:49 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

 * While you're at it, why don't you get rid of area and volume, since they're physically the same as length?

 * I'm not serious, by the way. The point is that T ≠ T-1. It's perfectly reasonable to have periodic phenomena listed on one page and one-shot phenomena listed on another. Not only is the phrase "shortwave radiation has a cycle time of 0.1μs (10MHz)" horribly counterintuitive and at odds with the terminology of the general public, it's dimensionally dubious. -- Tim Starling 07:36 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

 * I'm not really with you on the area and length. The reciprocal of frequency is wavvelength, and they are often treated similarily (even on the scale of your radio). For me it made sense to make the Hz links point somewhere, and I still think it is nice to combine them. Perhaps a short introductory sentence that explains the connection would help? -- Egil 06:13 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

 * Area is the same as length in that you could say on 1 E3 m:
 * a square with sides 1.4km has the same area as Monaco
 * Converting from Hz to s requires a little bit of rhetoric and some dimensional manipulation, just like m2 → m.
 * Converting from Hz to s requires a little bit of rhetoric and some dimensional manipulation, just like m2 → m.
 * Converting from Hz to s requires a little bit of rhetoric and some dimensional manipulation, just like m2 → m.

 * When I wrote my comment, I thought you were actually merging pre-existing Hz pages with s pages. I'm content now, but I'd be happier if someone would write Hz pages. I'm not going to do it myself because I think trivia lists are a waste of time. Please ignore my backseat driving :)

 * I don't think an introductory sentence explaining the connection is necessary. -- Tim Starling 10:23 19 May 2003 (UTC)

Energy & mass
I think the "energy" are put together into the same row as "mass" based on the formula "E=mc2", right? It is however that 1 kg times square of light speed = 1 * 3 E 6 * 3 E 6 = 9 E 18 J, but it was put into the position of 1 E 17.

Also, 1000 kWh = 1000 * 1000 * 3600 = 3.6 E 9 J, but it was put into the position of 1 E 12.

-- Tomchiukc 07:15, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

The last line
What does the last line actually mean ? " It doesn't need to remain secret because nobody will believe that it exists in either case. Ewige blumenkraft." Jay 06:21, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

 * I've removed the following text:

Secret Society
''The Order of Magnitude is also a secret society. A branch of the Illuminati. Its method of controlling the academia is to invent imaginary fields of science so that brain power won't be used on a real field, in which advancement might some day threaten the Illuminati. Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology, and Cellular Automata are all examples of these ruse fields. It doesn't need to remain secret because nobody will believe that it exists in either case. Ewige blumenkraft.''

I assume that the meaning of the second-to-last sentence is that this "secret society" is such a ridiculous idea that nobody would believe it even if it did exist and even if its existence was published. Which is true. "Ewige Blumenkraft" is German for (approximately) "flower power forever", and is a motto of the Illuminati secret society in the novel Illuminatus!. Onebyone 10:39, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

100 CM
100 cm is missing from this page. Where it should fit in I'm not sure, though... I'm too lazy to do the math, I just noticed it, sorry. Pakaran. 23:56, 8 Feb 2004 (UTC)

 * Somewhere between 1m - ε and 1m + ε I should think. -- Tim Starling 00:03, Feb 9, 2004 (UTC)

 * Ok, I'm more than overdue to my homework now. I was seeing 1, 10, 100, 1, everywhere else, so I figured someone must have left out the 100 cm entry :) Pakaran. 00:05, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Lining up of different quantities
In a square, can two areas correspond to one side length? In a cube, can three volumes correspond to two side areas?

The lining up of different quantities is not really accurate here, and is difficult to verify because of the ridiculous number of different units being used.

Brianjd 08:33, 2004 Jun 17 (UTC)

title: Talk:Order of magnitude/Archive 2


text:
Lancashire Cotton Famine

The Lancashire Cotton Famine, also known as the Cotton Famine or the Cotton Panic (1861–1865), was a depression in the textile industry of North West England, brought about by overproduction in a time of contracting world markets. It coincided with the interruption of baled cotton imports caused by the American Civil War and speculators buying up new stock for storage in the shipping warehouses at the entrepôt. It also caused cotton prices to rise in China, in which trade had been steadily increasing following the Second Opium War and during the ongoing Taiping Rebellion. The increase in cotton prices caused the textile trade to rapidly lose two-thirds of its previous value of exports to China from 1861 to 1862. The worldwide cotton famine also produced a boom in cotton production in Egypt and Russian Turkestan.

The boom years of 1859 and 1860 had produced more woven cotton than could be sold and a cutback in production was needed. The situation was exacerbated by an overabundance of raw cotton held in the warehouses and dockyards of the ports and the market was flooded with finished goods, causing the price to collapse, while at the same time the demand for raw cotton fell. The price for raw cotton increased by several hundred percent due to blockade and lack of imports. The inaccessibility of raw cotton and the difficult trading conditions caused a change in the social circumstances of the Lancashire region's extensive cotton mill workforce. Factory owners no longer bought large quantities of raw cotton to process and large parts of Lancashire and the surrounding areas' workers became unemployed and went from being the most prosperous workers in Britain to the most impoverished.

Local relief committees were set up and appealed for money locally and nationally. There were two major funds, the Manchester Central Committee and the Mansion House Committee of the Lord Mayor of London. The poorest applied for relief under the Poor Laws, through the Poor Law Unions. Local relief committees experimented with soup kitchens and direct aid. In 1862, sewing classes and industrial classes were organised by local churches and attendance merited a Poor Law payment. After the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act 1864 was passed, local authorities were empowered to borrow money for approved public works. They commissioned the rebuilding of sewerage systems, cleaning rivers, landscaping parks and surfacing roads. In 1864, cotton imports were restored, the mills were put back into production but some towns had diversified and many thousands of operatives had emigrated.

Background
The 1850s had been a period of unprecedented growth for the cotton industry in Lancashire, the High Peak of Derbyshire, and north east parts of Cheshire. The region had swamped the American market with printed cottons and was speculatively exporting to India. The populations of some mill towns in Lancashire and the surrounding region had almost doubled, the profit to capital ratio was running at more than 30 per cent, and a recession was looming. In 1861, the slave-owning southern states of America, where most of the world's raw cotton was produced, declared their independence and attempted to secede from the United States of America. The situation quickly deteriorated, culminating in the outbreak of the American Civil War and leading to an immediate, protracted interruption of the cotton supply – initially by a voluntary boycott by Southern planters who believed a run on the cotton would quickly debilitate the British economy and force them to intervene on the South's behalf. By the time it became clear that this strategy was ineffective, the resumption of cotton exports was prevented by the Union blockade of Southern ports.

In 1860, there were 2,650 cotton mills in the region, employing 440,000 people who were paid in total £11,500,000 per annum, of whom 90 per cent were adults and 56 per cent female. The mills used 300000 hp, of which 18,500 (18500 hp, per cent) was generated by water power. The mills had 30.4 million spindles and 350,000 power looms. The industry imported 1390938752 lb of raw cotton a year. It exported 2.78 billion yards of cotton cloth and 197343655 lb of twist and yarn. The total value of its exports was £32 million.

First year
Unsold cloth had been building up in the warehouses in Bombay (Mumbai); production had exceeded demand and short time working was inevitable. As indications came that trouble was possible, the American growers hurried to export their crop early. Almost enough of the 1861 crop reached Liverpool to supply the mills. Middling Orleans, the type of cotton that was used to gauge the prices, was selling for $7 3/4$d a pound in June 1861.

It was initially believed that British warehoused stocks of cotton would be adequate to see out the anticipated brief conflict. As all the Union advances early on were driven back, it became clear to European observers that the war would not be over quickly. By December, Middling Orleans was selling at $11 3/4$d/lb. The merchants were holding onto their cotton, speculating on a price rise. By the beginning of 1862, mills were being closed and workers laid off; one-third of the families in one Lancashire cotton town were in receipt of relief. The price of Middling Orleans, which had been produced at a cost of $3 3/4$d and bought by the merchants for 8d in 1861, rose to 2s. 3d. by October 1862, and to 2s. 5d. the following year. It is calculated that the merchants had a windfall of £35 million.

Surat
Sea Island (also known as extra long staple), grown on the islands off the Carolina coast of America, was the best quality cotton; Egyptian — the name given to Sea Island cotton that had been introduced into Egypt — was the second best grade. The most common grades were the short staple Gossypium hirsutum (American upland) cottons which included Middling Orleans; it was these grades that were used by the majority of Lancashire's calico producers. The Surat cottons from India were the least suitable for machinery and were only ever used as a small percentage of a mixture as the fibres were short and broke easily. Surat came in smaller bales which contained stones and other impurities. Each town in Lancashire used different mixtures and when the supply of American and Sea Island Cotton dried up, the mill owners moved over to Surat. Some machines could be adjusted to take it but extra humidity was needed to reduce breakages. Running a loom on Surat could only produce about 40 per cent of the previous throughput and, as workers were paid by the piece, their income was slashed.

Mill owners were also in difficulty as many of the smaller family-owned mills were mortgaged and if they stopped running the owners would fall behind with payments. Shopkeepers had no sales and could not afford the rents, workers defaulted on their rents and the landlord who stood the loss was often the mill owner. The wealthier mill owners such as Henry Houldsworth, were confident that the famine was temporary and planned for the new more efficient larger machinery that was becoming available, it was during the famine (1863–65) that he built Houldsworth Mill, Reddish, the first of the next generation of larger mills and at the time the world's largest mill with 138,000 spindles. With most raw cotton unavailable, mill owners had to either close mills and attempt to help the workers financially, use inferior cotton or bring new cotton into production. Surat was available but mainly used internally in British India. Some limited increase in production was achieved. Attempts were made to establish Sea Island in Queensland and New Zealand and to grow short staple near Mumbai.

Suffering
The cotton industry had become highly specialised by the 1860s and the severity of the famine in different towns depended on many factors. Some towns were built around mills using short fibre American cotton, while others used the longer fibre Egyptian cotton still available. Some mills had mules that could be adjusted to use a different cotton, while others did not. Owners of "integrateds" (mills that both spun and wove) could better balance the workload, thus preserving the precious raw material for longer. Some cautious mill owners always held stock in hand, while others bought as required.

The older paternalistic mill owners who lived among the local community were quick to divert their neighbours and workforce to maintenance work at their own expense. For example, in Glossop, Lord Howard called a family meeting of mill owners, clergy and "respectable" residents to take charge of the situation. Two relief committees were formed which experimented unsuccessfully with soup kitchens then set about distributing thousands of pounds worth of provisions, coal, clogs and clothing. Calico printer Edmund Potter loaned money to his workers and Howard took on extra workers on his estate. They set up schools, provided free brass band concerts, gave public readings from the Pickwick Papers and after the enactment of 1864 Public Works Act, took a loan to extend the waterworks. The only recorded tension was when the Relief Committee mistakenly decided to auction, instead of distributing free, a gift of food from the American federal government. Towns with room and power mills and a strong co-operative tradition were quick to mitigate the social damage. The firms using them would rent the space and buy the machines on credit; cotton was cheap and the profit from the cloth was used to pay off the loan and provide a return for the risk. When cotton was unavailable they were the first to go bankrupt. After the famine the need was for more advanced machines and bigger mills. The investment required was too much for many private mill owners, and limited companies built the new larger mills. Limited companies developed fastest in the areas with a room and power tradition. Municipal authorities did not have the legal power to borrow money to finance public works until the 1864 Act; before this they had to use their own reserves, which varied from town to town.

Panic
Some workers left Lancashire to work in the Yorkshire woollen and worsted industries. A small number of mills such as Crimble Mill, Heywood converted to woollen production buying in second hand fulling stocks, carding equipment, mules and looms. The towns of Stockport, Denton and Hyde diversified into hat making. Tameside was the worst affected district and suffered a net loss of population between 1861 and 1871. In 1864 there were 2,000 empty houses in Stockport and 686 in Glossop, along with 65 empty shops and fifteen empty beer houses. The exodus was caused primarily by evictions. The spring saw a wave of emigration stimulated by special agencies. The steamship companies cut their rates (steerage to New York cost £3 15s 6d), the Australian and New Zealand governments offered free passage, and 1,000 people had emigrated by August 1864, 200 of them from Glossop.

Relief effort

Relief in times of hardship was governed by the Poor Relief Act 1601, which required Poor Law Guardians to find work for the fit. In rural communities this was stone breaking in the quarries, the mines etc. Outdoor work was quite unsuitable for men who had been working in the humid, heated mills, whose lungs had been damaged by cotton dust. The act only required that men be set to work as long as he continued to receive relief.

The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 had required parishes to come together to form Poor Law Unions to administer the relief. Their job was to minimise the cost to the parishes, which were compelled to finance their own poor. Paupers should be returned to their parishes of origin. Charles Pelham Villiers MP, the Poor Law Commissioner who represented an industrial constituency, wrote to the Poor Law Unions in September 1861 warning them of potential famine and instructing them to fulfil their duties with Compassion. Money had to be raised locally on the parish rates. H. B. Farnell, was appointed by Parliament to investigate the effects in Lancashire, where he started in May 1862 in Preston. He laid down a liberal interpretation of the Act and instructed gifts from charity should not be taken into account when assessing need. As an alternative to outdoor work, sewing classes were run by the churches which entitled the participants or "scholars" to receive benefit. Bible Reading classes followed and then industrial classes which taught reading, writing and simple maths with carpentry, shoemaking and tailoring. The Poor Law Unions were limited in the monies they could raise through rates and had no powers to borrow. Parliament passed the Union Relief Aid Act 1862 which allowed the burden be shared between the parishes and the county and then Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act 1864 authorised borrowing.

All those in work were encouraged to subscribe to charity and lists of subscribers were published. Local relief committees were set up to administer these funds, receiving other donations from the Mansion House Committee of London and Central Relief Committee of Manchester. The Mansion House Fund, more properly named the Lancashire and Cheshire Operatives Relief Fund, was set up on 16 May 1862, when £1,500 (equivalent to about £0 in 2024) was sent to the distressed districts. Benefactors all over the United Kingdom, the Empire and across the world, raised money for the appeal. Between April 1862 and April 1863, £473,749 was collected and distributed (about £ in 2024). The Central Committee was formed 20 June 1862, composed of mayors of the affected towns; it put out an appeal letter to other towns across the country. A third fund, set up in June 1862 for slightly different purposes, was the Cotton Districts Relief Fund, which became part of the Central Committee.

Stalybridge Riot
By the winter of 1862–1863 there were 7,000 unemployed operatives in Stalybridge, one of the worst affected towns. Only five of the town's 39 factories and 24 machine shops were employing people full-time. Contributions were sent from all over the world for the relief of the cotton operatives in Cheshire and Lancashire and at one point three-quarters of Stalybridge workers were dependent on relief schemes. By 1863 there were 750 empty houses in the town. A thousand skilled men and women left the town in what became known as "The Panic". In 1863 the local relief committee decided to substitute a system of relief by ticket instead of money. The tickets were to be presented at the shops of local grocers. On Thursday 19 March a public meeting resolved to resist the tickets. On Friday 20 March 1863, the officials of the relief committee went to the thirteen schools to offer the tickets, the men refused the tickets and turned out onto the streets. They stoned the cab of the departing official and then broke the windows of the shops owned by members of the relief committee, then turned to the depots of the relief committee which they sacked. By evening, a company of Hussars came from Manchester; the Riot Act was read and eighty men were arrested; women and girls continued to harangue the police and soldiers.

On Saturday 21 March, the magistrates released most of the prisoners but committed 28 for trial in Chester. They were taken to the railway station by police and soldiers, who were pelted with stones. A further public meeting demanded "money and bread" not "tickets". Rioters demanded bread at various shops and in each case it was given to them. At 23:30, a company of infantry arrived and patrolled the streets with bayonets fixed. On the Sunday, supporters and visitors arrived in the town but there were no developments. On Monday 23 March the riot spread to Ashton, Hyde and Dukinfield. Schools had reopened but only 80 of the expected 1,700 students attended (agreed to be paid by ticket). Representatives were sent to the schools in the neighbouring towns to persuade the scholars to walk out but were met by soldiers. On the Tuesday the mobilisation ended, the relief committee offered to pay the outstanding tickets and to accept a delegation from the thirteen schools to discuss the matter further. The mayor offered that the MP John Cheetham would take the matter to parliament. The crowd believed that they had not lost relief and the ticket system would soon be abolished. The Stalybridge relief committee re-established authority. The Manchester Central Committee was critical of their poor management but they were being undermined by the Mansion House Fund of the Lord Mayor of London, which offered to distribute cash to scholars directly through the churches. The violence was blamed on outside agitators and the blame was put on an immigrant minority. Descriptions suggest about 3,500 participants, although there were only 1,700 scholars receiving aid.

Public Works Manufacturing Districts Act 1864
In March 1863, there were some 60,000–70,000 women attending sewing school and 20,000 men and boys attending classes. They were defined as doing useful work so could legally receive aid under the Poor Law legislation. There remained a further 25,000 men receiving aid but not doing any work. To Victorian thinking this was wrong and some means was needed to provide paid work. Local authorities did have work that needed to be done but no legal way to borrow to pay for it. The Public Works Manufacturing Districts Act 1864 became law 2 July 1863. This allowed public authorities to borrow money for public works. Cotton operatives could now be employed on useful projects.

The Lancashire area has a legacy of municipal parks that were created in this period such as Alexandra Park, Oldham. More important were the main sewers that were commissioned to replace the collapsing medieval drains and to bring sanitation to the hundreds of mill workers' cottages that supported the mills. Canals were dug, rivers straightened and new roads constructed such as the cobbled road on Rooley Moor above Norden known as the "Cotton Famine Road". The public works commissioned in this period left a major impression on the infrastructure of the towns of Lancashire and the surrounding cotton areas.

Cotton starts to flow
A trickle of raw cotton reached Lancashire in late 1863 but failed to get to the worst affected regions, being swallowed up in Manchester. The cotton was adulterated with stones but its arrival caused the principal operators to bring in key operators to prepare the mills. The American Civil War ended in April 1865. In August 1864, the first large consignment arrived and Wooley Bridge mill in Glossop reopened, giving all operatives a four and half day week. Employment then returned to normal. Raw cotton prices had risen from $6 1/2$d in 1861 to $27 1/2$d in 1864.

Politics
The Confederacy hoped that distress in the European cotton manufacturing areas (similar hardships occurred in France), together with distaste in European ruling circles for democracy would lead to European intervention to force the Union to make peace on the basis of accepting secession of the Confederacy. After Union forces had repulsed a Confederate incursion at the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 three decades earlier after a long campaign. The Unionists believed that all the British public would now see this as an antislavery issue rather than an anti-protectionism issue and would pressure its government not to intervene in favour of the South. Many mill owners and workers resented the blockade and continued to see the war as an issue of tariffs against free trade. Attempts were made to run the blockade by ships from Liverpool, London and New York. 71,751 bales of American cotton reached Liverpool in 1862. Confederate flags were flown in many cotton towns.

On 31 December 1862, a meeting of cotton workers at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, despite their increasing hardship, resolved to support the Union in its fight against slavery. An extract from the letter they wrote in the name of the Working People of Manchester to His Excellency Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America says:

"... the vast progress which you have made in the short space of twenty months fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity – chattel slavery – during your presidency, will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity. We are certain that such a glorious consummation will cement Great Britain and the United States in close and enduring regards."

On 19 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln sent an address thanking the cotton workers of Lancashire for their support,

"... I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the workingmen at Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built upon the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery, was likely to obtain the favor of Europe. Through the actions of our disloyal citizens the workingmen of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial, for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that attempt. Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterance upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is, indeed, an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation, and, on the other hand, I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among the American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury that, whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual. Abraham Lincoln"

A monument in Brazenose Street, Lincoln Square, Manchester, commemorates the events and reproduces portions of both documents. The Abraham Lincoln statue by George Grey Barnard, 1919, was formerly located in the gardens at Platt Hall in Rusholme. The Federal American government sent a gift of food to the people of Lancashire. The first consignment was sent aboard the George Griswold. Other ships were the Hope and Achilles.

Effects in other parts of the world
To moderate the effects of the cotton famine, the British tried to diversify its sources of cotton by making former subsistence farmers in British India, Egypt and elsewhere grow cotton for export often at the expense of staple food production. An attempt to grow cotton was also made on the island of Sicily. With the ending of the American Civil War, these new cotton farmers became redundant and their cotton was hardly demanded. This led to their impoverishment and aggravated various famines in these countries in the second half of the 19th century.

In China, the British enjoyed an increase in trade following the results of the Second Opium War and subsequent rise of exports to China by 30 percent from year 1859-1860. But with the outbreak of the American Civil War caused disruptions driving the price of cotton "so high that the Chinese stopped buying from outside". The textile trade lost two-thirds of its value from 1861-1862 and kept falling.

Regions such as Australia, welcomed skilled spinners and weavers and encouraged their immigration.

Legacy
In a 2015 article, economic historian Walker Hanlon finds that the cotton famine significantly affected the direction of technological progress in domains relevant to textiles manufacturing using Indian cotton, particularly for gins, openers and scutchers, and carding machines. This manifested in the major manufacturer Dobson & Barlow utilizing four different gin designs over the course of four years, as well as a 19-30 percent reduction in wasted Indian cotton over the period from 1862 to 1868. Hanlon also finds that the relative price of Indian cotton to American cotton returned to its pre-Civil War level by 1874 despite significantly increasing in abundance, which is evidence of the "strong induced-bias hypothesis" as proposed by Daron Acemoglu.

English trad-folk group Faustus released their EP "Cotton Lords" in 2019, which takes five poems from the Lancashire Cotton Famine and sets them to music by Paul Sartin.

In 2022, Folk-Revival band Bird in the Belly adapted two poems into song from the University of Exeter Cotton Famine Poetry Archive. These appear on their album After the City.

title: Lancashire Cotton Famine