I watched the NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt today. The story was on March Madness, the NCAA bracket contests where you have to pick the outcomes of all the games played. He said the odds of getting them all correct were 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Then the following graphic appeared on the screen:

9.2000000000000000000Holt then said don’t bother to count them, it’s 18 zeroes. Sorry, idiots, that’s not how you write 9.2 quintillion. What you’ve written is 9.2. The trailing zeroes after the decimal point are meaningless. The correct way is:

9,200,000,000,000,000,000That’s 18 zeroes after the 9 if you round down, but you can’t just stick zeroes after a number in decimal form to increase its size. Did anyone at NBC graduate from 4th grade?