PeeWee,
"According to Wikipedia, the most common modern definition of a billion is that it refers to a thousand million."
Like you, I tend not to take every word of Wikipedia as gospel. But in this case it seems to concur exactly with what I'd written in the previous post; in that one thousand times one million equates to one billion.
I would agree that certain teachings and certain Americanisms have gradually weedled their way into other nations and cultures, and in fact, just tonight, I Rx'ed an e-mail from my pal in California, and he's still adamant that their version of one billion is equal to one million times one million. I have no reason to doubt his word, for it's all down to way that each of us have been taught. As DickyD says, his version of one billion is the same as the American way. Teachings have very much changed over the years, so I guess it's simply one of those debates where nobody is wrong and nobody is right.
And just to confuse matters even more, you have to remember that our Yankie cousins use a slightly different versions to weights than those of the British (their ounces/tea-spoons/table spoons is different than ours, for example).
For me, math-wise, especially in the electronics sense, the number 1,000 is what I consider to be the so-called magic number. For instance, 1,000 is usually denoted as Kilo (or just 'K' for short). 1,000 Ohms times 1,000 Ohms is the same as 1,000,000 Ohms (one million Ohms), again usually denoted as Mega (or 'M' for short). It gets even more interesting when one is using division as opposed to multiplication. In electronic terms one Farad is a HUGE number, so capacitance is mostly measured in divisions of one-thousandths thereof. Ten to the power of minus twelve is quite a common factor for measuring capacitance. And don't forget the humble Ampere. One Amp is also usually considered quite a large number in electronic terms. It is said that one of those tiny millipede critters has 1,000 legs, so mathematicians coined the phrase "milli" to denote a thousandth of. i.e: 1 milliamp is one-thousandth of 1 whole Amp - or simply 1mA, or 0.001A. Apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs here, but it should be easy to see why 1,000 is that magic number.
Incidentally, I recall an incident where one particular NASA rocket failed to make it into space. Instead it simply nosed-dived into the ocean just because a (British) employee had calculated a decimal point in the wrong place because of the American/British billion thing.
Dare we even get onto the subject of Trillion?
Since it's all because that Audie bird started this debate in the first place, I'll give her one squillion-zillion £££ if she now post some photos of her body piercings which I've heard so much about.
