The BBM Channel on BBM Channels (how meta is that?) has crossed the one million subscriber count. Now, you might have been expecting that when the million subscriber mark was crossed that the counter would merely tack on an extra digit and a comma.

Well you are so very wrong. Nope, BBM Channels switches to using scientific notation once you reach this point. Because why not? Technically what we're seeing here is E notation, with the "e+" standing in for the 10x that would be displayed here if this were a handheld calculator.

But it's not. It's a BlackBerry 10 smartphone, with more than enough room to display all the digits of 1,008,300. Especially since writing it out as 1.0083e+06 takes up more space than just writing it out. But once a BBM channel passes 1e+22 subscribers (that'd be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or ten billion trillion — approximately 1.4 trillion times the current population of the planet Earth, and many more times that the population of BBM users), switching to scientific notation will make perfect sense.

Thanks to Wilder for the highly amusing tip!

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