this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
461 points (97.7% liked)

Science Memes

10819 readers
4657 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.


Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21049862

The only numbers I will ever spell are one and zero, and only when using them as a pronoun, or for emphasis, respectively.

Is there ever a reason to not to use symbols when dealing with numbers? Why would "fourteen whatevers" ever be preferable to "14 whatevers". It's just so much easier to read numbers as symbols, not spelled out.

(Caveat, not including multipliers, like "273 billion").

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Context is everything, IMO.

In engineering work, numbers should always be digits. In prose, numbers should be spelled out.

Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; 12 eggs and 6 rounds of toast for their 3 sets of boistrous twins.

Compared to

Breakfast at the Thompson's was a busy affair; twelve eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boistrous twins.

To me it's pretty clear which of those reads better and more naturally as prose; digits really 'jump out' on the page, and while that is great for engineering texts, it is incongruent and distracting for prose.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Somewhat relevant to your example, recipes should have numbers in digits too. (But then again recipes are basically an engineering text.)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 week ago (2 children)

recipes are basically an engineering text

I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.

Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called "Cooking for Engineers" that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don't think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:

Cheesecake
Dirty Rice

He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.

[–] captainlezbian 2 points 1 week ago

Oh damn that’s a sensical format. I love it and may put my recipes in it once I start writing them properly

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

1/2 pound (225 g)

What kind of insanity is this a pound is 500g.

2 cups (390 g) rice

Your cups weigh 195g a piece? Reasonable for stoneware, I guess. But why are you telling me and what does it have to do with the mass of rice?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Cooking is just applied chemistry, after all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I've seen Breaking Bad, yes

[–] MisterFrog 5 points 1 week ago

Yeah that's fair. I personally prefer the first one, but I can see how it makes sense to not use digits there.

+1 ∆ for you (change my view points, a thing from r/changemyview)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In your example tho, you want those numbers to stand out. The reason the affair was busy, was because of the numbers. You want the numbers to jump out, because that's the important detail.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I appreciate your point, but I still believe spelled-out numbers work better.

In prose, especially fiction writing, the ideal case is that the words themselves slide neatly out of the way and become invisible, leaving only a picture in the reader's mind. Generally speaking, anything distracting is therefore counter-productive for fiction. Strange fonts and strange typesetting, while interesting, take the reader out of the prose. There's a reason almost every fiction book you pick up from the shelf uses Garamond.

In an engineering context, remembering exactly "12 eggs, 6 toast" is probably the most important thing, and numeric digits assist in that. In fiction however it doesn't matter if, by the next page, the reader has forgotten exactly how many eggs there were; the important aspect is to convey the sense of a large and chaotic family, and the overall impression is more important than the detail.

Thats why although the numbers are important for setting the scene, we really don't want them to jump out and steal attention. We don't want anything at all to have undue prominence, because the reader needs to process the paragraph as a cohesive whole, and see the scene, not the specific numbers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

yeah the first, we don't need letters when we have numbers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I was taught you only spell out numbers ten and under, so I would write it:

Breakfast at the Thompson’s was a busy affair; 12 eggs and six rounds of toast for their three sets of boisterous twins.