Stop calling a mole 6160.5 particles!

I see it way too often, even in serious newspapers: copying numbers that were originally in scientific notation, but without the superscript. For example: one mole is 6.022 × 1023 particles. This is just plain wrong! I hurts to see it! The number of particles in a mole is $6.022×10^{23}$ particles. The superscript 23 is a power of 10, meaning it is a 1 with 23 zeros. This is one hundred thousand times one billion times one billion The number in question is therefore 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000. Or more exactly: 602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000, as the number of particles in a mole is now exactly defined as this integer.

Equally silly is writing down 1.5×10-5 where you really mean $1.5×10^{-5}$. The former number means 10 (15 minus 5), but you intend to write 0.000015.

If you are restricted to ASCII and don’t have access to superscripts, please use the E notation for floating point numbers in programming languages: for example 6.022E23 or 1.5E-5. Or use the ^ notation like 6.022*10^23 or 1.5*10^-5.

And finally: if you explain a quantity in terms of football fields, Olympic swimming pools or the distance from London to Paris, always review that calculation or have it reviewed by someone else. I’ve seen if being off by a few orders of magnitude far too often.