Hello good people, I pit
Television Science programme reviewers.
A recent progmme about Sir Stephen Hawking mentioned this in it’s review:
‘Stephen continued with his research and’ in the late 1960s, he helped prove that the universe began trillions of of years ago with a big bang’.
Article from What’s on TV 7 - 13 oct.
If Hawking has done nothing else he’s enabled other scientists to close in on the idea of the age of the universe, 13.75 x 10 9.
Not trillions, 10 to the 12,
To write a review of a tv presentation and then get a simple answer concerning the age of the universe is insulting, wrong and just bloody stupid.
So I pit Journalists who stray beyond their own competence.
I blame the way the British were so slow to dump that “thousand million” shit and demote “billion” to its rightful place in the cosmos. It makes them easy to confuse. That, and many reporters are idiots.
Yep - I wasn’t aware of this until a couple years ago, but not only do they drive on the wrong side of the road, pay for public school (but have private school for free), not know how much they weigh in either pounds or kilograms, use a weird coinage system [shh - let’s pretend they never changed], have paper money different sizes, but they think a billion is 1,000x more than we do.
Now granted this doesn’t explain how you’d fuck up a billion for a trillion - unless you went back and forth between English and sci-notation a few times.
But it is hard to get angry at one guy for fucking this up - when their entire country is wrong about the number billion either a billion or a trillion times a day depending on who’s counting.
ETA: oh and I know they supposedly changed, but I’ve run across this mistake at least twice when dealing with people from the UK (who granted were older and maybe never got the memo). Still I think we should hold it against them.