Talk:1 E5 m

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page (and I guess the related ones as well) is wrongly named: "1 E5 m" means "1⁵ m", which of course equals "1 m", and not the intended "100 km". The name should be "10 E5 m" = "10⁵ m". Besides, it is clearer to not separate the notation of the exponent from the number it affects, thus "10E5 m" or "10e5 m" rather than "10 E5 m"; another option is to use a caret: "10^5 m". OTOH, I think that for numbers up to a million or a billion, writing them out in full would be the clearest: "100,000 m", or even better "100 km". Using the exponential notation makes full sense when dealing with really huge zillions with dozens of zeroes; but when dealing with numbers in the commonly used range, that notation is counterintuitive because numbers like 100 or 10,000 aren't commonly spelled 10E2 or 10E4 beyond some scientific writings, and so "10E2 m" or "10E4 m" look arcane to most people, while "100 m" and "10 km" are instantly understandable for everyone (and what most people would naturally query in the Wikipedia search). Uaxuctum 13:55, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

While your interpretation of the "E" as an equivalent of "to the power of" (or the caret sign ^) is suggestive, this is not common terminology. Instead, the notation "E..." is to be read as "times 10 to the ...-th", see for example scientific notation, or the syntax of floating point literals in most programming languages.

The reason for the rather cryptical naming of these articles is (as far as I understand) ease of linking: the articles seem to be intended to be linked from, ideally, every occurence of a quantity of the given order of magnitude to assist in "getting a feeling" for it, especially for those not familiar with the unit system (being more accustomed to anglo-saxon measures, for example). As all these articles use a consistent naming scheme now, you do not have to remember any individual article names to implement this. You may consider creating appropriate redirects, however. --J.Rohrer 20:22, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It's not "an interpretation of mine". Do a Google search for "10E5" and you'll get scores of technical and university pages where "10E5" stands clearly for "10⁵" - which is not suggestive of it not being common terminology. Using "1 E5" to mean "10⁵" is an idiosyncratic, not an intuitive choice, leading to confusion of interpretation and hindering the representation of other powers, because if E means "times 10 to the power of", how on earth does one represent "20⁵", "1⁵", "2⁵", etc.?

The notation is not intended for this, but for representation of floating point numbers in a fixed-base numeral system (usually base 10, of course), so, for instance, 20⁵ would be 32 E5. For general powers, one would use another notation, for example using the caret.

The immense majority of people are not naturally going to search for "1 E5" (nor link to "1 E5") when they mean "100,000". So, even if one chooses to name all the articles with a consistent but idiosyncratic, cryptic and confusing terminology, one isn't helping to make the Wikipedia any user-friendly. Names of articles should not be cryptic, but clear and free from possible confusions of interpretation. The E method is by all parameters not the appropriate one. The two options that do not lead to confusion are the caret method ("10^5 m") and the more user-friendly "100,000 m" (or even clearer "100 km"). Uaxuctum 17:21, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Who would search for such an article at all? You will usually come to these order-of-magnitude articles by following wikilinks, so one may argue that, from the readers' point of view, the naming is secondary. Personally, I do not particularly like the "E" notation, so I do not intend to defend the naming scheme any further, but in my opinion it is certainly not wrong and probably not even particularly misleading.

Whatever, if you wish to continue this discussion I suggest moving it on the parent article talk page. I will copy the above text there. Notice however that the topic seems to have been discussed before, see archive. --J.Rohrer 22:13, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] redundant ones

• 162 km — diameter of Puck, the largest of Uranus' inner moons
  • Only one moon per planet. (It would be nice if someone would make sure the included one is in about the middle of the range).
• 119 km — diameter of the asteroid 5 Astraea
• 185 km — diameter of the asteroid 6 Hebe
• 136 km — diameter of the asteroid 8 Flora
  • Only one asteroid, please. I left in all the Metro lengths, because people might live in the city mentioned. When people are living on any of these asteroids, feel free to re-add. (note: joke).
• 170 km — diameter of Himalia, one of Jupiter's moons
• 161 km — 100 miles
  • Conversions. We don't do them that way.
• 190 km — diameter of Sycorax, the largest of Uranus' outer moons
• 200 km — diameter of the asteroids 7 Iris and 9 Metis
• , Norway,
  • We don't need to know the country the fyord is in. Use the link.
• 178 km — diameter of Janus, one of Saturn's moons
• 234 km — diameter of the asteroid 3 Juno
• 266 km — mean diameter of Hyperion, one of Saturn's major moons
• 407 km — diameter of the asteroid 10 Hygiea
• 397 km — diameter of Mimas, one of Saturn's moons
• 499 km — diameter of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons
• 526 km — diameter of the asteroid 2 Pallas
• 700 km — range of a Scud-D missile
  • We don't need more than one scud type listed.
• 946 km — diameter of the asteroid 1 Ceres

As said earlier, feel free to re-add any ones you really care about. JesseW 05:42, 1 August 2005 (UTC)