This fascination with power, quantifying, measuring and comparing items seems to be an innate characteristic of an engineer. We want to improve and make things better. Depending upon the desired goal of course, we want to make things faster, smaller, more reliable, with more features, higher in quality, lower in cost and more powerful. In order to make these types of improvements happen, engineers are constantly measuring and comparing the key characteristics of a product, or a process, so that references or benchmarks are established. Once the benchmarks are established, engineers love to make comparisons using numerical methods whenever possible. There are continuous examples when we hear that some feature is 10 times faster or more powerful than it was before. Engineers love expressing these comparisons in multiples of another number, especially when the number is a factor of 10. Expressing numbers as factors, or powers, of 10 makes the arithmetic so much easier. As mentioned earlier, there are also a lot less zeros to write with this type of ‘shorthand’.