xkcd #2946: 1.2 Kilofives
xkcd #2946: 1.2 Kilofives
Alt text:
'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'
Bro,we have an international standard for this. To count things you need to use the unit of mole. This town has 9.96323e-21 mol of people in it.
It's sad there is only one Randall Munroe because he is irreplaceable.
Glad he’s young! As long as he outlives me, it'll all be okay.
I'm just now realising he's much closer to my age than I thought, may there be many decades of xkcd to come
I should email him and ask if three days a week is infrequent enough to avoid burnout. That’s pretty often to maintain such an incredible level of quality. (Tom Scott had enough after 10 years.) But maybe since it’s his full-time gig, it’s optimal - he can spend most of the week reading cool stuff that gives him tons of good ideas and he actually wouldn’t want to publish any less frequently.
Alt-text:
'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'
Thanks, added to OP. First time posting to this sub and didn't notice that others were posting the alt text to their OPs.
🎶And I would walk 5 hectomiles and I would walk 5 hectomiles more🎶
🎶Just to be the man who makes up fake measurements at your door🎶
I don't think that that was Lincoln's invention. I think that he was using some archaic European notation that made its way into English.
A lot of languages have some pretty odd ways of speaking numbers.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal
In several European languages like French and Danish, 20 is used as a base, at least with respect to the linguistic structure of the names of certain numbers (though a thoroughgoing consistent vigesimal system, based on the powers 20, 400, 8000 etc., is not generally used).
"Eighty-seven" in English is "quatre-vingt sept" in French; "four twenties seven", which is basically what he's saying.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
The second one is arguably not vigesimal but instead just an echo of the Germanic way of saying numbers that English has all but lost. You'd be surprised how long things will lurk around the fringes of a language despite not being the most popular way of saying things.
The fact it still makes sense probably helps too.
I don't know the full history, but the usage of "score" to mean twenty was in use since at least the creation of the King James Version of the Bible:
Psalm 90:10: The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Ah, the realization of Washington's dream