[rob74]

The long scale is far from just a novelty, most European countries other than the UK use it. Actually I thought it was used in all non-English-speaking countries, but Wikipedia showed me that the situation is far more complicated than I thought:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#/media/F...

Besides short scale and long scale, there is a sizable "short scale with milliard instead of billion" fraction, and of course some countries (China, India, Japan, Greece) have completely different systems. Most interesting is that Portugal uses the long scale, while Brazil uses the short scale. That must be confusing...

[whimsicalism]

almost all scientific writing i can find from people in portugal uses the short scale. english formal communication has standardized around the short scale

[alenrozac]

All scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too.

[whimsicalism]

> All scientific writing in Slovenia uses long scale. I've heard it being used in EU institutions too.

I am able to easily find plenty of Slovenian academics using short scale in their scientific writing. Remember, English is standard for scientific writing and publishing in international journals. I have yet to find a single one using the long-scale, actually.

https://link.aps.org/accepted/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.123540 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/abe6a7/... https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s40294-016-001...

> observations by cataloging positions and redshifts of billions of galaxies in the next decade > and the configuration is stable over billions of years. > (networks having up to a billion of vertices; there is no limit—except the memory size—on the number of lines