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Old 12-17-2014, 07:39 AM   #841
Daigoro
 
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Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Japanese numbers are easy enough to start with- knowing 1-10 gets you up to 99 by appropriate combinations.

But then they have a 10^4 system for generating large numbers, rather than English's 10^3. To explain:
10 - ju
100 - hyaku
1000 - sen
1,0000 - man
These combine to make larger numbers until you get to:
1,0000,0000 - oku
1,0000,0000,0000 - cho
... and so on.
Once you get the hang of it, this is easy enough to handle, as long as you continue to think in Japanese. The problem is when you try to translate back to English numbers, and doubly so when converting yen to dollars (at 100:1). I have to stop and think in index numbers before I can figure out the English.

Then there's counting. They use different number suffixes for different kinds of objects- generic things (-tsu or -ko), flat things (-mai), thin things (-hon), books (-satsu), people (-ri/-nin), animals (-hiki), birds (-wa) and so on. And the number prefixes are either from Japanese roots or Chinese roots or a mixture, just depending. Frequency and floors in a building are identical (-kai), except for 3, when 3 times is "sankai" but 3rd floor is "sangai". You could compare it to English's fascination with collective nouns (pride, herd, pack, gang) except it's far more integral to language use and comprehension.
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Old 12-17-2014, 08:08 AM   #842
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Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Then there are the unusual Medieval Roman numerals. Some of the letters stand for the oddest numbers (e.g. 6, 7, 11, 151).


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Old 12-19-2014, 09:39 AM   #843
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Originally Posted by Hans Rancke-Madsen View Post
Then there are the unusual Medieval Roman numerals. Some of the letters stand for the oddest numbers (e.g. 6, 7, 11, 151).


Hans
Speaking of unusual numbers, I just saw that Japanese covers up to 10^68 (or 10^88), which is unusually large. It's easy enough to come up with names for arbitrarily large numbers (e.g. a googolplex), but I can't imagine if 10^68 was ever needed in 17th century Japan (the source of these numbers was a 17th C Japanese maths text). Possibly such numbers are talked about in esoteric Buddhism.


---

More world weirdness-
A million corpse cemetary from 7th century Egypt
Another interesting find was that the corpses appeared to be grouped together by hair colour, with one section containing the remains of those with blonde hair and another for those with red hair.
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Old 12-19-2014, 10:17 AM   #844
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Speaking of unusual numbers... up to 10^68 (or 10^88), which is unusually large... Possibly such numbers are talked about in esoteric Buddhism.
Archimedes invents a notation in "The Sand Reckoner" for expressing large numbers. It uses powers of a Greek myriad (10^4, as with the Chinese/Japanese power series) so that he can calculate his estimate of 8 x 10^63 grains of sand to fill the universe. Actually, it uses powers of powers of powers, or you could describe it as positional notation in base 10^8.

The story behind the Towers of Hanoi is most likely apocryphal, but if somehow not not, those monks needed the number 2^64 - 1.
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Old 12-19-2014, 03:25 PM   #845
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Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

English has googol and googolplex, but those are silly completely useless numbers.
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Old 01-08-2015, 03:17 PM   #846
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Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Alex Jones thinks your lightbulbs are programmed to kill you.
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Old 01-13-2015, 09:49 PM   #847
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Pendleton Ward (creator of Adventure Time) and Pat McHale (creator of the creepy/whimsical mini-series Over the Garden Wall) collaborated on an RPG (possibly a LARP) in 2006: http://www.angelfire.com/punk/lifequest/

Why am I not surprised?

It is so cool seeing kids who grew up as gamers being given the reins of television shows that become hits.
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Old 01-13-2015, 11:16 PM   #848
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Originally Posted by Daigoro View Post
Speaking of unusual numbers, I just saw that Japanese covers up to 10^68 (or 10^88), which is unusually large. [...]. Possibly such numbers are talked about in esoteric Buddhism.
That number is only about the 17th - 22nd power of 10,000, which makes it about as "extreme" as sextodecillion.
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Old 01-14-2015, 01:13 AM   #849
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That number is only about the 17th - 22nd power of 10,000, which makes it about as "extreme" as sextodecillion.
Such a common "real" English word that a basic Google search showed a whole 6 results.
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Old 01-21-2015, 01:26 PM   #850
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X-ray technique reads burnt Vesuvius scroll
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30888767

Because as any CoC player can tell you, "Sure this is a good idea!"
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