[lightedman]

"Tangent: orders of magnitude are exponential"

Orders of Magnitude, n; a class in a system of classification determined by size, each class being a number of times (usually ten) greater or smaller than the one before."

There are very few disciplines where OOM is done by exponential form (astronomy/star magnitude being one of them.) It's almost always base-ten. When you use electrical conductivity in mineral identification, you're always multiplying a number by ten multiple times over. The effect of that? You either add or remove an equal amount of zeros to the original number being multiplied.