2946: 1.2 Kilofives

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1.2 Kilofives

Title text: 'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

Explanation

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Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address features the phrase "four score and seven"‍ to refer to 87 (a score refers to the number 20). Cueball likes the idea of unusual ways to refer to numbers so he uses a metric prefix to state the population of the town (1.2 * 1000 * 5 = 6,000).

In the title text, Cueball continues to annoy White Hat with his unusual ways of expressing numbers. 50 milliscore, or 50 * 1/1000 * 20, is equal to 1.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball, with his palm raised, is talking to White Hat. There is a sign on the ground in the background.]

Cueball: It's a pretty small town - the population is just 1.2 kilofives.

[The sign reads:]

Welcome to

East Hills

Pop. 6,000

[Caption below the panel:]

I don't know why Abraham Lincoln should be the only one who gets to come up with weird ways to say normal numbers.

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Discussion

Challenge: Come up with a way like this to say the comic number #2946. Barmar (talk) 03:00, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

How about 4.91 hectosixes? 172.69.33.190 04:19, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

A kibitwo, four decascore, four score and eighteen. Two octooctotwentythrees and two. A gross-score, three score and 6. Jordan Brown (talk) 05:00, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

A semidozen tetrahectaenneacontahena. Xkcd machine guy (talk) 08:25, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

A decapentagross minus a semiennea. Xkcd machine guy (talk) 10:10, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

A gross score and half a dozen elevensesTier666 (talk) 12:57, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Interestingly, four score and seven is exactly how you say 87 in French (quatre-vingt sept) and Basque (laurogeita zazpi). Both count on base 20. 172.70.90.138 05:16, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

That's not a coincidence. French and English are closely related linguistically and culturally. It would be nice to work this info into the explanation. 162.158.167.94 15:46, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Fun fact: libqalculate and the "Qalculate"/"qalc" programs can just deal with the title text:

   qalc "50milli score"
   50 × (10^−3) × score = 1

But it fails on the main part, the best that works is:

   qalc "1.2kilo 5"
   1.2 × 10³ × 5 = 6000

"five" gets interpreted as Euler's number × imaginary unit × unknown "f" × unknown "v". On my old laptop, I must have some other configuration or maybe an old version, because there it gets interpreted as 0×i×e=0, so you can enter "five plus five" and get 0. Maybe another challenge would be to get arbitrary misleading results out from equations like this. Fabian42 (talk) 05:59, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps East Hills NY, but their "Welcome" boards don't mention population, https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@40.7805262,-73.632634,3a,15y,25.75h,92.88t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sf5guvv2tETuyn0f_lSFh7A!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&coh=205409&entry=ttu so this might just be a random name that R. came up withZeimusu (talk) 07:40, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

In the comic *fives* does not stand for the number five alone, but for five people. So using it with a prefix is more valid. Sebastian --172.68.110.4 10:15, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Five kilopeople would be valid. 172.70.91.63 10:34, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I think it would have made more sense to say "half a kilodozen". --141.101.69.45 11:54, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

It's just slightly off a gross of ultimate answers. 172.70.162.186 16:30, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I wonder why Randall chose to make Cueball the character saying that and not Black Hat/classhole. Turquoise Hat (talk) 15:35, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Live long enough to become the villain. ProphetZarquon (talk) 17:14, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I realized that kilofives can be abbreviated as **k5**, as in "the population is 1.2 k5". Or if you're a roman, as **D**. 172.71.22.92 16:30, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Wouldn't CIↃ have been rendered as <I>? ProphetZarquon (talk) 17:22, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I like it. I'm gonna start using this technique more. P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 20:04, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

The weird thing is, this wasn't a weird way to say a number, it was just an old way to say it. See Psalm 90:10 in the King James Bible more examples. 172.70.162.17 20:51, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Y2K isn't really a nonce, it's rather common to shorten e.g. "123 thousand" to 123K or 123k. From my 00's online gaming days, I even remember kk, kkk and so on having been used to refer to millions, billions and progressively higher powers of 1000 respectively, but that might've been more niche. 172.70.242.38 22:09, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd also like to see the source for the claim "they're not ordinarily added to number words to modify their magnitude". For example, in Czech it is very common to say "mega" instead of "million(s)" (similar way as "thousand" is substituted with "K" in "Y2K") when talking about money and I've seen this usage also in English. --172.68.213.148 22:26, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

English does use mega as a prefix, albeit not frequently. The most common example in common usage is possibly megaton (of TNT) for nuclear weapons, but it's also frequently used in slightly more technical discussions; megahertz, megawatts, megabytes and megapixels are the usages that most immediately come to mind. -- TimO (talk) 11:27, 17 June 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I understood that to mean that "mega" can be used in the narrative place of "million(s)", or equivalent. Like 2,000 of your finest Pounds Sterling (or US Dollars) could be described as "two grand"(/"two Gs"), bit in Czech cases it (sounds like it might be) "two mega". Maybe also used in something like "a mega reasons not to go visit the in-laws...", as the kind of phraseology it lets be used. Although (just checking), it looks like "thousand" in Czech is (normally) "tisíc"... so it isn't really saving much talking ("thou-sand" vs "grand"/"Gee has an abbreviating quality, as well as being a slang/cant replacement - albeit meaning these days the obfuscation is fairly widely known and vastly deprecated for that purpose). Perhaps a Czech (or an older Slovak, if not someone from that additional historic minority, the 'O's!) could clarify. I presume 176.68.213.148 is one, or at least knows enough to resolve all confusion/talk to their actual Czechian friends about it! 162.158.49.94 11:57, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Y2K should be Y2k - the SI prefix for 1,000 is k to distinguish it from the unit abbreviation K, for Kelvin. 172.68.210.22 23:18, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

That would be a very cold year.141.101.98.184 09:36, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

Just a little chilly. P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 14:16, 17 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd have said East Hills is home to a hundred shocks. (Or one hectoshock?) 😉 PaulEberhardt (talk) 14:35, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Coincidence that Abraham Lincoln is on the five-dollar bill? 172.69.71.170 15:26, 17 June 2024 (UTC)