A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21049862
The only numbers I will ever spell are one and zero, and only when using them as a pronoun, or for emphasis, respectively.
Is there ever a reason to not to use symbols when dealing with numbers? Why would "fourteen whatevers" ever be preferable to "14 whatevers". It's just so much easier to read numbers as symbols, not spelled out.
(Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion").
Engineer here.
Typically when I type out professional emails or documents that contain numerical values, I write out the number followed by the digits in brackets if it is ten [10] or below for cases of amount, unless I am listing out the counts of items, then I only use digits.
"The updated electrical design will require three [3] new, pad-mount 500kVA transformers to replace the three [3] existing 225kVA transformers,each located on floors four, five, and six."
Three and four hundred fifteen quintillion five hundred ninety two quadrillion six hundred fifty three trillion five hundred eighty nine billion seven hundred ninety three million two hundred thirty eight thousand four hundred sixty three sextillionths
Is less than ten
What kills me is when people will mix the two in a single context.
"Between eight and 13 percent"
NO. If you're writing one number in digits, you need to write them all the same way.
This kills me, but its not as bad as the habit of new articles/print authors to switch between first and last names of the same person within a few sentences.
They will introduce Jeff Snoms, and then refer to them has "Jeff" and "Snoms" interchangeably for no discernable reason. It gets really maddening when they are doing it with 3 or 4 people, so suddenly the story has 2x as many characters involved.
This is how I approach it. If there's only a few numbers mentioned and they're small, write them out. If there's many numbers mentioned, then they should all be numbers. And I catch myself messing it up all the time and going back to edit the one number I put in there because it just looks wrong. Context is everything, really.
Oh damn, that is some nails on a chalkboard level stuff.
Spell out numbers under 10, but not when it's divisible by three or five.
Hahaha, of course, it makes so much sense now
00, 01, 10 there i did it
Context is everything, IMO.
In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.
Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.
Compared to
Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.
To me it's pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really 'jump out' on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.
In your example tho, you want those numbers to stand out. The reason the affair was busy, was because of the numbers. You want the numbers to jump out, because that's the important detail.
Somewhat relevant to your example, recipes should have numbers in digits too. (But then again recipes are basically an engineering text.)
recipes are basically an engineering text
I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.
Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called "Cooking for Engineers" that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don't think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:
He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.
Yeah that's fair. I personally prefer the first one, but I can see how it makes sense to not use digits there.
+1 ∆ for you (change my view points, a thing from r/changemyview)
yeah the first, we don't need letters when we have numbers
Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion"
You mean 273e9?
I'll allow billion, but personally my preference is using powers of 10 or unit prefixes.
Just I'm not gonna be mad about the newspaper writing 3.5 billion dollars.
Unless that number means something different from US$ 3.5e9.
If you are one of those people that think your country uses the other "billion", just don't.
More like 273G in engineering.
Only if you have a unit.
273 GW 👍
Else, looks kind weird, to my eyes anyway. But fair point haha
Too bad people underuse it.
Separating the prefixes from the unities is very useful even in calculations where both are there.
Euros count as a unit 😏
3.5 G€
Ok, while I'm being facetious, let's do it for dollars too. G$3.5... oh that's horrible!
I've never seen that outside of videogames
TIL engineers use gazillion
It’s a highly technical term for “lots and lots.”
Nein
Any number that I write down is a number. I am not writing novels, the numbers I write down are supposed to be easy you find. You look through the document to find numbers, that is easy to do.
Yeah I'm with you on this. I'm not sure if this was clear in the meme (I am an engineer), but I think the style guides can go shove it. I'm always going to write the symbols, not spell it out.
I somehow have "spell out if less than 13" burned in my mind from somewhere in middle school. No idea if it is right, but so far it has worked.
There are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes it ends up being "between five and 15" which is psychotic.
I spell out numbers when I want to emphasize them.
Take George Orwell for example:
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" has a lot more of a punch to it than just "1984."
I used to work in a library, and I hate this. We used to have both a "2001: a space Odyssey" and a "two thousand and one: a space oddesey", sorted based on the spelling.
Isn't that part of the reason we have Dewey/LoC system?
Those are for academic books, not novels. And you'd still sort everything within a category alphabetically by author and then by title (usually)
Yeah haha, this is why it came to my mind. In this case it's a title, so not really for the purpose of being used as a number.
Though, I suppose I didn't specify this