Talk:2946: 1.2 Kilofives

Challenge: Come up with a way like this to say the comic number #2946.

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)

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)

Comic discussion

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)

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)