Billion

Billion has meaning of large amount of something; Billion is almost equivalent of specification A lot of.

Also, billion can be interpreted as an integer number; its value may vary from \(10^{9}\) to \(10^{12}\). .

Use of this term billion indicates that even the order of magnitude of the quantity cannot be estimated.

The term is often used by pseudo–scientists and journalists who cannot estimate even orders of magnitude of quantities they are talking about.

Examples of the use
The economical cost of mitigation of the damage due to the Fukushima disaster is estimated to be of order of 10 trillion yen or 124.55 billion dollars . Perhaps, the author mean the USA dollars. Then, if one knows the relation between Japanese yen and the USA dollar, one can write the equation for the possible meanings of words trillion and billion and guess the order of magnitude of the quantity mentioned; giving the estimate of \(10^{14}\) dollars of order of magnitude of cost of the nuclear energetics to Japan. On the other hand, the practice of use of words without certain meaning, like billion and trillion, indicates the bad will or poor education of the authors, causing doubts in any information they distribute.

Keywords
Trillion, Confuson