alt Hacker News This scale sometimes goes to 11, for example the size of the solar system is ↑11 meters, but even the size of the entire universe is only ↑27 meters. Which should indicate both how “universal” this scale is, and also how big the universe is!
"Got it, so the universe is 3x bigger than the solar system."
"No no, remember these are base 10 logarithms."
"Ah... so it's 16x!"
"No, 10^16x."
"Ah... so it's totally incomprehensible."
It feels like that at first glance because you haven't done the work to internalize the notation. This is like someone who uses Roman Numerals being introduced to decimal notation, and getting confused that "22" isn't just twice "2". Yet no one these days would say that decimal notation is merely syntactic shuffling.
The notation helps, but you still have to do the work.