ORDERSOFMAGNITUDE

When dealing with big numbers, or better yet, when dealing with big differences between two numbers, a good Idea is talking about their order of magnitude. The concept is pretty much misunderstood: roughly speaking, the number of powers of 10 contained in a number. So, 100 (102) has an order of magnitude of 2, and 10,000 (104) has an order of magnitude of 4.

There are several nice examples dealing with orders of magnitude, but I like this one particularly: the size of the data. In this chart, the sizes of several different data (biologic, analog and digital) are shown. Clicking the lower button increases 3 orders of magnitude, while clicking the top button decreases 3 orders.


Note: I’m using SI units. So, a Kilobyte is 103 bytes (1000 bytes), instead of 210 bytes (1024 bytes, that is called a kibibyte or KiB). I couldn’t verify if the sources where I collected the data used the same notation, thus, don’t take the data shown here seriously.

Source of almost all the data: www.bbc.com.