Alt text:

‘Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.’

  • Turun@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    12 days ago

    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.

    • 9point6@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      edit-2
      12 days ago

      I’m just now realising he’s much closer to my age than I thought, may there be many decades of xkcd to come

      • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        12 days ago

        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.

        • Butt Pirate@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          12 days ago

          I mean Randall has been doing the comic since like 2004 or something so I feel like if he was going to burn out, he would have by now. At this point him burning out would just be him retiring.

        • Revan343@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          12 days ago

          I used to frequent the same IRC channels as Randall; I always got the impression it’s a case of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”

          Edit: semicolon

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      12 days ago

      Thanks, added to OP. First time posting to this sub and didn’t notice that others were posting the alt text to their OPs.

  • teft@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    🎶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🎶

  • tal@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    12 days ago

    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.

    Sing a Song of Sixpence has:

    Four and twenty blackbirds

    Baked in a pie.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      12 days ago

      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.

      • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        12 days ago

        Could also just be trying to get the right number of syllables for the line. “Four and twenty” is one beat longer than “twenty four.”