i hear this or a similar variant in conversations in passing all the time when someone wants to say that something happened a long time ago and they casually state a number that is exponentially years before the Big Bang.
Is it just me or do you want to strangle people who use the phrase"Hundreds of billions of yearsold"
What about hundreds of trillions or even gazillions of years old?
The only person I really want to strangle now is that fat little fucker in North Korea.
Even worse are people who use the phrase “trillions of light years”. The universe ain’t that big!
Who’s saying that? I’ve never heard it. I would have noticed.
Can’t say that I’ve noticed people ever using the phrase. I’m annoyed by people using stupidly inaccurate numbers to indicate long distances, though, such as saying something about aliens from a million miles away (barely past the Earth) or going too far in the opposite direction and saying a million light-years away (in intergalactic space.)
You can’t – unless your fingers are real fucking long. That bastard is a real tubby.
I can’t get angry about this.
I’ve yet to let go of the hate for the use of the word Nuke-You-Ler.
Tom Holt (the British comic fantasy/SF writer) has a habit of referring to inappropriately large time scales in his books, which sometimes irritates me, because the times he gives (for example) imply that the dog species originated 100 million years ago, which is way, way off (100 million years ago was the middle of the Cretaceous).
Never in a million years have I been less upset about someone’s exaggeration.
Are they american billions or normal billions?
Must be metric billions.
My favorite example of this is when Superman got frozen to “one thousand degrees below zero” on the original TV show. I always wondered if that was Fahrenheit, Celsius, or Kelvin.
I can’t say I want to strangle them, I just classify them as stupid children, who shouldn’t be listened to.
Like people that say “I’m a million percent sure” or “irregardless”
Innumeracy comes in all orders of magnitude. There was an episode of Star Trek where Spock mentions some supposedly humongous number as “one to the thirtieth power”. (Easy to imagine script writers writing that. Harder to imagine Nimoy failing to catch that.)
It’s well known that people, by and large, don’t comprehend numbers that involve huge or miniscule orders of magnitude. This is most serious in the areas of economics – How many people can comprehend the real impact, for example, when Trump rails about the millions (billions? gazillions?) of dollars the military spends on medical care for transgender people. Or how small a pittance is that Food Stamps budget of $70.9 billion a year?
You really want to strangle someone for that? Maybe cut back on the caffeine.
It is irritating but not nearly so much as the grotesque use of “It’s in our DNA” to indicate a principal quality or comptency by people who don’t actually understand what DNA is. For a while, I had to deal with a representative of a three letter agency who literally used this phrase two or three times in an hour long weekly call, and it really made me want to lecture him on what DNA is and why it is a stupid metaphor.
Stranger
That ain’t nothin’. In the Hindu cosmology there are cycles of hundreds of trillions of years.
Back in 2010, I was looking for work and kept seeing jobs where they were looking for people with 5 years experience with Windows Server 2008. So, I feel your pain, in a microcosm.