Disturbing the Natives

I noticed today at work that if you apply a multiplier to a common unit of measurement (if your multiplier is sufficiently obscure) then you can confuse the hell out of them. For example, today I used the phrase “giga-ounce”. Any computer nerd, or anyone with any mathematical sense, knows that a giga- refers to a billion of said unit. So when I explained this, and showed a giga-ounce to be 62,500,000 pounds, (one-sixteenth of a billion, evidently) or 31,250 tons, the response was, “I’ll take your word for it”. I didn’t go so far as to suggest a giga-ounce bottle of beer, which by division yields 7,812,500 gallons, or more visibly, 142,045 fifty-five gallon drums with 25 gallons left over. But there is about 10,566,882 gallons in an Olympic swimming pool, so the giga-ounce is just shy…

So you see, playing with multipliers can be great fun.