The power heuristic: When is a billion not a billion? http://bit.ly/1AZHVoj
‘One’, ‘two’, ‘many’, or ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘two-and-one’, ‘two-and-two’, ‘two-and-two-and-one’. Learning to count is a doddle in cultures that use a base-2 counting system where knowing that there are simply lots of something is usually enough. Anthropologists marvel at their primitive abilities which compare unfavourably to higher primates and even some species of birds but most civilisations, they argue, need more than that, like a base-10 system. However, ask your average-person-on-the-street how many millions there are in a billion and you might get an answer approximating ‘many’. Since the richest people’s fortunes and everyone else’s national debts started to breach the 999,999,999 mark we have been dealing with competing versions of what comes next, making it tricky for most of us to keep track....
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