[chrismorgan]

“Order of magnitude” is context-dependent, like a great many things in natural language. In the absence of any contrary context, it’ll mean a decimal order of magnitude in English. It will do you no good to rail against the inclusion of cultural context in resolving the meaning of language (and even its structural parsing!), because it’s so very widespread in English and I presume in every other natural language (though logical languages could potentially theoretically evade it).

I’ve never encountered non-integral bases in real life, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numeration tells me they are sometimes used. Fun stuff!

[klyrs]

Agreed, railing against language and cultural context is literally futile. Factoradic is the one true base. There, "order of magnitude" would depend not only upon (my very unique) cultural context but also the absolute magnitude involved (at the low end, "double" is an order of magnitude; then "triple", then "quadruple", etc).

[chrismorgan]

I love these sorts of discussions. You learn things you’ve never heard of before. I can easily see how it works and how it’d be useful sometimes, but I’ve never come across it before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_radix is good related reading (including the concept of measuring time in this way; now that is something that we sometimes do in software, more or less).