It's not so much that I am right, but sometimes I will take issue when authoritative posts are made that contain misinformation or make incorrect statements.
...
Once again that nasty behemoth, Microsoft messes with everything universal.
While ASCII is a universal defacto standard, Microsoft insisted on creating its own Unicode scheme that is proprietary versus the public domain scheme.
...
It's not so much that I am right, but sometimes I will take issue when authoritative posts are made that contain misinformation or make incorrect statements.
Oh yeah. Getting a bit meta here and way off topic I'm starting to wonder what, if anything, might stop the internet driving the human race to chaos and madness. For example:
Person A posts some statement that is presented as factual.
Person B posts pointing out that A's post is total fiction.
After that A and B might argue it out. Person C, D and E etc might chime in.
Meanwhile Person X, who may be any of the other billions of people on the planet now or in the future, reading all that has no frikken way to find out who is correct.
Whatever it was that may or may not have been a fact is lost forever.
Alright... I think I understand it now. I came over to my hole, so I didn't get accused of the crime of smoking in the presence of a 4 year old... and of course, if I smoke, I might as well drink... so after getting a bottle at my favorite gas station... Thorntons... $2.19 a gallon. I get here and then remember that I forgot my $99 tablet that Libby picked up for me in Bloomington.
God's plan? Infuse me with domain name envy and laugh my Smile off.
Erco... While I'm trying to remember that Frenchman's name...
What do you mean by cheap?
They should be paying you just to grace their server with your presence. If you decide that you really want those buckets of money... I would suggest pointing the Government of China at this forum and then your domain... and then enter a brief negotiation as to how large that wheel barrel is going to be.
Piaget... if you have never heard of him, he was instrumental in the development of the entire area of development psychology... which resulted from his observation of his own children(2). He deserves that credit and no-one should doubt his contribution.
But his real passion was a philosophical inquiry into the structure of knowledge, itself. For this, he deserves no credit and his works have to be among the greatest exercises in circular logic ever created by man. What he was basically arguing about, however, is exactly what lead up to the state that bothers you now.
Prior to Piaget, when certain facts could be weaponized and were important for security reasons... those facts were publicly buried.
We had a director of you know what who argued... basically as Piaget had beneath the surface, that the facts need to be available... but masked from public acceptance and availability... You basically would need to know where to go... where to look in order to get at the information. And that's what we have today. You have to be beyond the post-doctural level to access it intelligently. It was designed exactly the way it is... to serve a purpose... to avoid an epistemologic crisis. It didn't work.
It's not so much that I am right, but sometimes I will take issue when authoritative posts are made that contain misinformation or make incorrect statements.
...
Once again that nasty behemoth, Microsoft messes with everything universal.
While ASCII is a universal defacto standard, Microsoft insisted on creating its own Unicode scheme that is proprietary versus the public domain scheme.
...
Sometimes I do get off into the weeds. It seems that HTML generally uses UTF-8 regardless of OS. While MS tries to assert UTF-16 in their .net. I am just so jaded about MS that I seemed to imagine problems that may not be there. The 1990s were a chaotic turf war amongst the OSes with dubious business practises.
Unicode indeed claims to be a standard, but it is a standard with seven or more different formats and obviously some are strongly preferred by specific OSes. So the unifying standard seems to mostly be in the coding of character sets.
Unicode does not "claim" to be a standard. Given the world wide consortium of companies that support the effort, the resulting standards documents accepted by various international standards bodies and the support in most modern software it is definitely a standard.
What it is not is an encoding. It's a way to assign numbers to the symbols people use. You can read it here: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode8.0.0/ I pretty sure you won't find any encodings defined there.
Not sure what you mean by 'encodings'. But I really prefer to stick with ASCII and UTF-8. It seems that the various companies agreed standarize only so much, and then deploy differently.
Yes, the Unicode documents claim it is a standard. Something similar has been asserted about Forth-83 being a standard or ANSI C being a standard. But deployment has harsh realities that promulgation ignores.
So I am willing to accept that Unicode is a standard because it says it is a standard in the preamble at its only web site. But in the back of my mind, it is a work in progresss.
If you are going to standardize a mapping of symbols to numbers as a world wide standard it would be nice if people could actually use it. When I say people, I mean me
The numbers are easy enough obviously. But how do I get to use see those symbols? For that I need a font that contains the symbols.
As far as I know there is no way to equip my computer with enough fonts to display all 1 million and more symbols defined in the standard. Fonts tend to be expensive or have restrictive licensing. There are not free and unrestricted fonts available to cover all the defined symbols.
So, great work unicode guys. You have defined the numbers and the symbols but I'm not allowed to use the symbols. Or even see what they look like!
Now, the unicode consortium does indeed show us all the symbols in their standards documents. In PDFs containing embedded fonts. But those fonts are not available:
The fonts and font data used in production of the Unicode Standard may not be extracted, or used in any other way in any product or publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface owner(s).
You know, like the way "a", "b", "c"..."1", "2", "3" and the rest are encoded into binary in the ASCII encoding. EBCDIC, UTF-8/16 and many others are different encoding.
We could get a bit meta and say that a symbol like π can be encoded as "π" in an HTML page or "\u03C0" in Javascript source. Which in turn are the strings you see here encoded in UTF-8 or whatever.
You are right, standards do get "bent", intentionally or just by poor or incomplete implementation. Still unicode is standard in all meanings of the word. They claim it is standard, international standards bodies accept it, all the world uses it and interchanges documents with it, a lot of software understands it. How "standard" do you want?
You are also right, unicode is a work in progress. We now have version 8 of the standard, that means there have been at least 7 versions before it ! This is no different than the evolving standards for C, C++, Javascript whatever. This is a "good thing". Else we are unable to progress.
I have no idea what happened to the Forth standards. If the Forth community abandoned the effort after Forth 83 then that is it. There is a reason the world does not use Forth.
There are online IDN or punycode tranlators that will let you enter a greek or whatever domain name and get the ASCII version of it.
Under Linux there is the idn2 program that does such conversion:
$ idn2 2π.net
xn--2-umb.net
If you manage to register an international domain name you may not see the punycode version until you hit your dashboard at your registrar. There you will see it everywhere.
By the way, I tried searching for IDN's on a few registrars and godaddy.com was the only one that handled it nicely if at all.
2π.net is now an order of magnitude quicker to load!
After much hair pulling I finally figured out how to get react.js to render my Propeller Panel to HTML on the server. So the initial page load and display is lightning fast. No more "loading" page page or spinner required.
It's easy when you get there React.js has been moving fast recently so the API has changed. I think what I finally ended up with is simpler than many examples on the net.
The Java Script is now loaded after the initial page draw so you don't notice that latency. It's also minified and zipped down to 1MB from the raw 3 and a bit MB of the original source!
Some new features are a login and sign up page, we will want some security when tweaking Propellers remotely.
Sadly in the process of rearranging the code all the communication back to the server is busted so the terminal and button panel don't work for now.
Are you suggesting I'm prone to exaggeration? Me never.
"Order of magnitude" is that hand wavy scientific slang for about a factor of ten. Could be anything between 5 and 50. After that it's two orders of magnitude.
In this case I think it's about right. The 3.5MBytes of javascript used on that page is reduced to about 500K by optimization, minification and zipping. There is 7 times less time to wait for the down load right there.
Also now the initial page view is rendered as fast as possible from a very small bit of HTML. The JS is downloaded in the background. That gives the user a sense that this is very responsive. It's a bit of a con but better than looking at a loading page or download spinner as you do for Microsoft's online mail and other heavy web sites.
Prone to exaggeration? No, not really. Ambiguity or imprecision perhaps.
And order of magnitude can be a doubling or a factor of ten or some other number, but it really should be declared rather than vaguely referenced. What is an order of pancakes at one restaurant may be a big disappointment at another restaurant. And 'order of' anything is not precise. Ever notice whan an order of magnitude on the Richter scale is? What about the Mercalli scale which is based on news reports?
Nevertheless, I am curious if you are actually letting people manipulate a Propeller remotely at your site as a demonstration. And if so, do you have your Propeller wired into a router with OpenWRT software allowing it to reach the outside world?
I am back into using my hacked TP-Link MR-3020 wifi mini-router with a Propeller for a new project. The code you compiled is very helpful to that effort.
What exactly is Heaterese is a whole different subject.
Do what? The only ambiguity or imprecision seems to be that I speak English and most people in the world don't .
As I said "order of magnitude" is that hand wavy scientific slang for about a factor of ten. Ten is the default assumption. Ask any cosmologist.
Ordering pancakes is a whole different meaning of "order".
Now, to serious matters. At the moment Propanel on http://2π.net does not communicate any further than the server on Amazon Cloud Services virtual machine instance that is serving it up.
The intention of course is to get access to a Propeller, wiggle it's pins, read it's pins, talk to it over the terminal, even program it maybe. What to do?
Firstly all this can be served up by a Raspberry Pi or other little ARM board. Tested and working. Possibly it can be served up by one of the routers here running OpenWRT, MR-3020, D-LINK etc. We shall see. All I have to do then is point a sub-domain of 2π.net at my home IP address.
After that Propanel will have a serial link to the Propeller.
Open access is one thing. Just for fun. But then I want to add HTTPS and authentication. After all I may not want just anyone wiggling my propeller's pins. I was kind of thinking to offer a challenge to hack into my authentication solution, with a mystery prize
Well, I am all for using 'the other little arm'. Though that sounds a bit strange to others. After all the MR-3020 came with a case and a power supply. There really is no reason of have XWindows, and all that GUI support sit idle. And HDMI flatscreens are expensive. If your Propeller has a USB interface, you don't even have to open the MR-3020, just swap to OpenWRT firmware.
So you speak English and the rest of the world doesn't. How quaint, an archaic ethocentric view. I am still not sure you have any right to claim that the default figure for an 'order of magnitude' is ten. We just use base ten as a defacto numerical base.
I don't really thing English is the problem, more likely language in general. One speaks or writes, and another misreads or mistakenly hears.
Consider the fact that each degree on a thermometer is an order of magnitude, not 10 degrees. And we struggle bettween Celcius and Farhenheit. You really should be looking to Mercalli and how he promulgated his scale of earthquakes.
What's an order of magnitude in hurricanes? Why are newcasters always quick to mention the scale they are using.
I'm all for using the MR-3020. Currently I don't know if I can get node.js running on it and if I can I don't know if it will have enough memory to handle the propanel server. If not perhaps I could dispense with the server side rendering which would be a shame.
As it is it took two minutes to get this running on a Pi. I agree, I don't need XWindows and a GUI with a screen, keyboard and mouse. The Pi I'm using has none of that. Just a simple headless Debian install. I talk to it's command line interface over ssh. Actually that reminds me, I was thinking to install OpenWRT on a Pi sometime.
Of course one idea is to have a terminal interface in propanel that allows one to access the Pi/MR-3020/whatever command line shell.
Magnitude is a measurement of an amount or quantity. Magnitude can be used to describe many things, but an order of magnitude specifically means x10. Look it up.
Stars have magnitude. It's a measure of brightness, but it's logarithmic, not by orders of magnitude. Storms are not measured by orders of magnitude, the measure of their intensity is classified into categories. Degrees are not orders of magnitude. An order of pancakes is a request for pancakes, which is a completely different definition for "order".
Okay, I looked it up.
My Webster's College Dictionary has nothing about the phrase.. not surprised.
Wikipedia has an entry (I am a bit surprised) that says the x10 factor is often considered 'intuitively speaking', but then has a whole section discussing 'non-decimal orders of magnitudes' -- such as the magnitude of stars.
The factor of ten is indeed useful when discussing 'similar orders of magnitude'.... kinda of like figures in the right ball-park.
I merely assert that the 'intuitively speaking' factor of x10 is not that clear. It is a concept that enjoys a lot of imprecision. But I do have to admit that in certain professional contexts the meaning is pretty much accepted by agreement when working together.
Sorry, but I simply suspect certain parts of language use imprecision just to get on with discussion.
I am surprised a college dictionary does not have "order of magnitude". It's been a very common expression in the sciences and engineering since forever.
The non-decimal meaning of "order or magnitude" is rare. Makes no odds really as we are talking a log scale here, so you only have to multiply by a constant to turn one into the other.
Consider the fact that each degree on a thermometer is an order of magnitude, not 10 degrees
I considered it. It's not a fact at all. That is not how order of magnitude is defined and used.
@RDL2004
An order of pancakes is a request for pancakes, which is a completely different definition for "order".
Yes, except:
A cosmologist walked into a bar and ordered a beer for every star in the galaxy. The bar man said "That might take a while, it's an order of magnitude"
Well, phrases seem to be a hit and miss entry in any English dictionary. The Chinese actually have two standard dictionaries - one for characters and groups of characters, and another for standard idioms.
So 'order of magnitude' may be considered an idiom of sorts that doesn't find a home in a dictionary. We just learn what it is from the community we are working within... a verbal tradition?
My Oxford "Concise Dictionary of Mathematics" by C. Clapham, 1996 has lots of 'order of xxxx' entires, but no 'order of magnitude'.
I guess we just have to turn to Wikipedia for all and everything -- books can't keep up. Maybe a engineering dictionary would have it.
Well, I guess I should get rid of my Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and just use on-line resources. Bookshelves are becoming a bit retro.
Still, the Oxford Dictionary listing did say 'usually ten' and include two other alterantive definitions that are in line with I asserted.
I guess you mean a normal on-line dictionary.
My English language students here are constantly complaining about words and phrases being absent from their dictionaries. I have convinced most that Google just might have the answer.
Comments
Cool, what is that phone?
Thing is if I want to use unicode characters I have a real problem.
For example, I want to use a unicode lower case PI:
If I'm editing an HTML file I have to write π or π or π
If I'm writing C/C++/Java/Javascript source code I have to write "\u03C0"
If I'm writing Python source code I have to write u"\u03C0"
Seems if I want to do that in vim I have to read and understand this: http://www.alecjacobson.com/weblog/?p=443
If I want to use emacs I need to do this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10192341/how-to-enter-greek-characters-in-emacs
And so on and so on...
This is all Smile. I just want my keyboard to somehow allow me to generate a "π". Job done.
My keyboard should emit UTF-8, which can be fed into pretty much any modern program, without any translation by any OS.
Yes, I can get a foreign language keyboard and configure my OS to work in that language. That is not what we need.
Person A posts some statement that is presented as factual.
Person B posts pointing out that A's post is total fiction.
After that A and B might argue it out. Person C, D and E etc might chime in.
Meanwhile Person X, who may be any of the other billions of people on the planet now or in the future, reading all that has no frikken way to find out who is correct.
Whatever it was that may or may not have been a fact is lost forever.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Samsung Alias 2. You can own one for just $27!
God's plan? Infuse me with domain name envy and laugh my Smile off.
It's all so clear now.
What do you mean by cheap?
They should be paying you just to grace their server with your presence. If you decide that you really want those buckets of money... I would suggest pointing the Government of China at this forum and then your domain... and then enter a brief negotiation as to how large that wheel barrel is going to be.
Rich
Piaget... if you have never heard of him, he was instrumental in the development of the entire area of development psychology... which resulted from his observation of his own children(2). He deserves that credit and no-one should doubt his contribution.
But his real passion was a philosophical inquiry into the structure of knowledge, itself. For this, he deserves no credit and his works have to be among the greatest exercises in circular logic ever created by man. What he was basically arguing about, however, is exactly what lead up to the state that bothers you now.
Prior to Piaget, when certain facts could be weaponized and were important for security reasons... those facts were publicly buried.
We had a director of you know what who argued... basically as Piaget had beneath the surface, that the facts need to be available... but masked from public acceptance and availability... You basically would need to know where to go... where to look in order to get at the information. And that's what we have today. You have to be beyond the post-doctural level to access it intelligently. It was designed exactly the way it is... to serve a purpose... to avoid an epistemologic crisis. It didn't work.
Sometimes I do get off into the weeds. It seems that HTML generally uses UTF-8 regardless of OS. While MS tries to assert UTF-16 in their .net. I am just so jaded about MS that I seemed to imagine problems that may not be there. The 1990s were a chaotic turf war amongst the OSes with dubious business practises.
Unicode indeed claims to be a standard, but it is a standard with seven or more different formats and obviously some are strongly preferred by specific OSes. So the unifying standard seems to mostly be in the coding of character sets.
sin.2π.net
cos.2π.net
tan.2π.net
What it is not is an encoding. It's a way to assign numbers to the symbols people use. You can read it here: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode8.0.0/ I pretty sure you won't find any encodings defined there.
Yes, the Unicode documents claim it is a standard. Something similar has been asserted about Forth-83 being a standard or ANSI C being a standard. But deployment has harsh realities that promulgation ignores.
So I am willing to accept that Unicode is a standard because it says it is a standard in the preamble at its only web site. But in the back of my mind, it is a work in progresss.
It's impossible for me to display.
If you are going to standardize a mapping of symbols to numbers as a world wide standard it would be nice if people could actually use it. When I say people, I mean me
The numbers are easy enough obviously. But how do I get to use see those symbols? For that I need a font that contains the symbols.
As far as I know there is no way to equip my computer with enough fonts to display all 1 million and more symbols defined in the standard. Fonts tend to be expensive or have restrictive licensing. There are not free and unrestricted fonts available to cover all the defined symbols.
So, great work unicode guys. You have defined the numbers and the symbols but I'm not allowed to use the symbols. Or even see what they look like!
Now, the unicode consortium does indeed show us all the symbols in their standards documents. In PDFs containing embedded fonts. But those fonts are not available:
The fonts and font data used in production of the Unicode Standard may not be extracted, or used in any other way in any product or publication, without permission or license granted by the typeface owner(s).
Unicode is indeed a huge 💩 (Google it)
We could get a bit meta and say that a symbol like π can be encoded as "π" in an HTML page or "\u03C0" in Javascript source. Which in turn are the strings you see here encoded in UTF-8 or whatever.
You are right, standards do get "bent", intentionally or just by poor or incomplete implementation. Still unicode is standard in all meanings of the word. They claim it is standard, international standards bodies accept it, all the world uses it and interchanges documents with it, a lot of software understands it. How "standard" do you want?
You are also right, unicode is a work in progress. We now have version 8 of the standard, that means there have been at least 7 versions before it ! This is no different than the evolving standards for C, C++, Javascript whatever. This is a "good thing". Else we are unable to progress.
I have no idea what happened to the Forth standards. If the Forth community abandoned the effort after Forth 83 then that is it. There is a reason the world does not use Forth.
How did you convert "\u03C0" (I see where that comes from in the Unicode for Greek) to "-umb" (I see where the "xn--2" comes from) ?
I was thinking about some other addresses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
There are online IDN or punycode tranlators that will let you enter a greek or whatever domain name and get the ASCII version of it.
Under Linux there is the idn2 program that does such conversion: If you manage to register an international domain name you may not see the punycode version until you hit your dashboard at your registrar. There you will see it everywhere.
By the way, I tried searching for IDN's on a few registrars and godaddy.com was the only one that handled it nicely if at all.
More info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
After much hair pulling I finally figured out how to get react.js to render my Propeller Panel to HTML on the server. So the initial page load and display is lightning fast. No more "loading" page page or spinner required.
It's easy when you get there
The Java Script is now loaded after the initial page draw so you don't notice that latency. It's also minified and zipped down to 1MB from the raw 3 and a bit MB of the original source!
Some new features are a login and sign up page, we will want some security when tweaking Propellers remotely.
Sadly in the process of rearranging the code all the communication back to the server is busted so the terminal and button panel don't work for now.
In the unlikely event anyone is interested in the code it's here: https://bitbucket.org/zicog/propanel
Yes that is JavaScript despite the classes and imports. And the total lack of loops and functions!
I guess that is Heaterese for twice as fast. Gut.
Are you suggesting I'm prone to exaggeration? Me never.
"Order of magnitude" is that hand wavy scientific slang for about a factor of ten. Could be anything between 5 and 50. After that it's two orders of magnitude.
In this case I think it's about right. The 3.5MBytes of javascript used on that page is reduced to about 500K by optimization, minification and zipping. There is 7 times less time to wait for the down load right there.
Also now the initial page view is rendered as fast as possible from a very small bit of HTML. The JS is downloaded in the background. That gives the user a sense that this is very responsive. It's a bit of a con but better than looking at a loading page or download spinner as you do for Microsoft's online mail and other heavy web sites.
I have to do some real measurements on this...
And order of magnitude can be a doubling or a factor of ten or some other number, but it really should be declared rather than vaguely referenced. What is an order of pancakes at one restaurant may be a big disappointment at another restaurant. And 'order of' anything is not precise. Ever notice whan an order of magnitude on the Richter scale is? What about the Mercalli scale which is based on news reports?
Nevertheless, I am curious if you are actually letting people manipulate a Propeller remotely at your site as a demonstration. And if so, do you have your Propeller wired into a router with OpenWRT software allowing it to reach the outside world?
I am back into using my hacked TP-Link MR-3020 wifi mini-router with a Propeller for a new project. The code you compiled is very helpful to that effort.
What exactly is Heaterese is a whole different subject.
As I said "order of magnitude" is that hand wavy scientific slang for about a factor of ten. Ten is the default assumption. Ask any cosmologist.
Ordering pancakes is a whole different meaning of "order".
Now, to serious matters. At the moment Propanel on http://2π.net does not communicate any further than the server on Amazon Cloud Services virtual machine instance that is serving it up.
The intention of course is to get access to a Propeller, wiggle it's pins, read it's pins, talk to it over the terminal, even program it maybe. What to do?
Firstly all this can be served up by a Raspberry Pi or other little ARM board. Tested and working. Possibly it can be served up by one of the routers here running OpenWRT, MR-3020, D-LINK etc. We shall see. All I have to do then is point a sub-domain of 2π.net at my home IP address.
After that Propanel will have a serial link to the Propeller.
Open access is one thing. Just for fun. But then I want to add HTTPS and authentication. After all I may not want just anyone wiggling my propeller's pins. I was kind of thinking to offer a challenge to hack into my authentication solution, with a mystery prize
This might all take some time...
So you speak English and the rest of the world doesn't. How quaint, an archaic ethocentric view. I am still not sure you have any right to claim that the default figure for an 'order of magnitude' is ten. We just use base ten as a defacto numerical base.
I don't really thing English is the problem, more likely language in general. One speaks or writes, and another misreads or mistakenly hears.
Consider the fact that each degree on a thermometer is an order of magnitude, not 10 degrees. And we struggle bettween Celcius and Farhenheit. You really should be looking to Mercalli and how he promulgated his scale of earthquakes.
What's an order of magnitude in hurricanes? Why are newcasters always quick to mention the scale they are using.
God save the Queen!
Sorry, what is it that sounds strange to others?
I'm all for using the MR-3020. Currently I don't know if I can get node.js running on it and if I can I don't know if it will have enough memory to handle the propanel server. If not perhaps I could dispense with the server side rendering which would be a shame.
As it is it took two minutes to get this running on a Pi. I agree, I don't need XWindows and a GUI with a screen, keyboard and mouse. The Pi I'm using has none of that. Just a simple headless Debian install. I talk to it's command line interface over ssh. Actually that reminds me, I was thinking to install OpenWRT on a Pi sometime.
Of course one idea is to have a terminal interface in propanel that allows one to access the Pi/MR-3020/whatever command line shell.
Stars have magnitude. It's a measure of brightness, but it's logarithmic, not by orders of magnitude. Storms are not measured by orders of magnitude, the measure of their intensity is classified into categories. Degrees are not orders of magnitude. An order of pancakes is a request for pancakes, which is a completely different definition for "order".
My Webster's College Dictionary has nothing about the phrase.. not surprised.
Wikipedia has an entry (I am a bit surprised) that says the x10 factor is often considered 'intuitively speaking', but then has a whole section discussing 'non-decimal orders of magnitudes' -- such as the magnitude of stars.
The factor of ten is indeed useful when discussing 'similar orders of magnitude'.... kinda of like figures in the right ball-park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
I merely assert that the 'intuitively speaking' factor of x10 is not that clear. It is a concept that enjoys a lot of imprecision. But I do have to admit that in certain professional contexts the meaning is pretty much accepted by agreement when working together.
Sorry, but I simply suspect certain parts of language use imprecision just to get on with discussion.
The non-decimal meaning of "order or magnitude" is rare. Makes no odds really as we are talking a log scale here, so you only have to multiply by a constant to turn one into the other. I considered it. It's not a fact at all. That is not how order of magnitude is defined and used.
@RDL2004 Yes, except:
A cosmologist walked into a bar and ordered a beer for every star in the galaxy. The bar man said "That might take a while, it's an order of magnitude"
So 'order of magnitude' may be considered an idiom of sorts that doesn't find a home in a dictionary. We just learn what it is from the community we are working within... a verbal tradition?
My Oxford "Concise Dictionary of Mathematics" by C. Clapham, 1996 has lots of 'order of xxxx' entires, but no 'order of magnitude'.
I guess we just have to turn to Wikipedia for all and everything -- books can't keep up. Maybe a engineering dictionary would have it.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Oxford Dictionaries
Still, the Oxford Dictionary listing did say 'usually ten' and include two other alterantive definitions that are in line with I asserted.
I guess you mean a normal on-line dictionary.
My English language students here are constantly complaining about words and phrases being absent from their dictionaries. I have convinced most that Google just might have the answer.