I've been wondering about this for quite a while now. Why does everybody automatically assume that I'm using the decimal system when saying "orders of magnitude"?!
Because, as xkcd 169 says, communicating badly and then actung smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness. "Orders of magnitude" refers to a decimal system in the vast majority of uses (I must admit I have no concrete data on this, but I can find plenty of references to it being base-10 and only a suggestion that it could be sometihng else).
Unless you've explicitly stated that you mean something else, people have no reason to think that you mean something else.
I've been wondering about this for quite a while now. Why does everybody automatically assume that I'm using the decimal system when saying "orders of magnitude"?!