Interesting article on Tennessee caves

[Ernie Coffman]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... Id=6395687 will take you to an interesting article on TN caves. This state has over 8000 of them in their karstlands, which encompass most of the state.

[UnderGroundEarth]

Gerald stated at the TCS meeting a few weeks ago that Tennessee is nearing 10,000 caves...!

[graveleye]

last years meeting he said the same thing... getting close to 10m caves.

Y'all need to get crackin"!!

[Ernie Coffman]

Graveleye, do you mean "10K" rather than "10m?" "M" would stand for million--not! And, it could stand for "meter" but I'm sure all of the caves in TN are long than that, so...appreciate your humor, but maybe it needs an edit. <grin>

[UnderGroundEarth]

Graveleye, do you mean "10K" rather than "10m?" "M" would stand for million--not! And, it could stand for "meter" but I'm sure all of the caves in TN are long than that, so...appreciate your humor, but maybe it needs an edit. <grin>

m is the roman numeral for 1,000 and mm is used for million. it's actually common, at least in my workplace to use these instead of numbers.

[graveleye]

Graveleye, do you mean "10K" rather than "10m?" "M" would stand for million--not! And, it could stand for "meter" but I'm sure all of the caves in TN are long than that, so...appreciate your humor, but maybe it needs an edit. <grin>

Kelly is correct. I'm a buyer for an international fastener distributor and we work with 1000's and millions of parts. It is our industry standard to abbreviate and use "m" for thousands, "mm" for millions, "c" for hundreds and so on. Otherwise all those zeros get really messy. It's just a habit for me.

[Ernie Coffman]

Well hot dog on that Kevin! Haven't used Roman numerals since elementary school, so that's a new one on me. I thought they went by the wayside, except on some buildings. Learn something new everyday...and that's great news! Thanks for this!

[NZcaver]

Well hot dog on that Kevin! Haven't used Roman numerals since elementary school, so that's a new one on me. I thought they went by the wayside, except on some buildings. Learn something new everyday...and that's great news! Thanks for this!

Well how about that. This is a new one for me too. I've don't recall ever seeing standard numerals mixed with roman numerals to designate quantities before, just standard numerals by themselves or with metric suffix letters, i.e. 10,000 or 10k.

The roman numeral for 10,000 would normally be an X with a bar over it, and a million would be |X| with a bar over it. Roman numerals are always capitalized, so there is no "mm" only "MM" which is 2,000. (Clearly I spend too much time editing technical documents.)

If somebody has an industry reference for mixing standard and roman numerals like this, they should probably edit the Wikipedia page. Wow, now we're totally off-topic.

[Magee]

I grew up in the printing industry. We always use M for 1,000.