Round number alert!


We’re only a few hundred comments away from a nice round 2,000,000 total comments on this blog.

Of course, that number is totally fictitious because we lost over half the comments when NatGeo took over from ScienceBlogs, and then we lost a lot more when we ported over to this site from NatGeo, but hey, the round numbers are an artifact of using base 10, anyway. The current count is 111101000001010011000 in binary, which ends in a bunch of zeroes already.

Comments

  1. lotharloo says

    The current count is 111101000001010011000 in binary, which ends in a bunch of zeroes already

    Not anymore.

  2. Who Cares says

    That title got me going for a second. I thought we were back at people wanting to redefine π like they tried in Indiana in 1897.

  3. azpaul3 says

    A totally nerd post. No useful information. No great insights into either the human or the spider condition. Just total nerd.
    Delightful.
    One of the reasons I come here. You got everything.

    Hope you’re feeling at least a bit better, Dr. M.

  4. billseymour says

    Not counting existing comments in this thread (which will probably change before I finish writing this), that’s 7501230 octal, 1E8298 hexadecimal.

    I don’t claim to have said anything interesting.  I just wanted to add another comment.

  5. birgerjohansson says

    Will the Old Ones return when we get a big row of zeroes?
    Will we get another TV series with Lance Henriksen? (checks his age)
    -Will we get a TV series with the zombie of Lance Henriksen?

  6. blf says

    What would it be in the Sumerian base 60 system?

    According to Base N Convert, 2m (decimal) is 9,15,33,20 (not checked), using Otto Neugebauer‘s notation. In cuneiform that may be 𒐇 𒌋𒐊 𒌍𒐈 𒎙 (you need a Unicode font with cuneiform) which seems to match the table at the Neugebauer citation. It almost matches Babylonian Numerals, albeit that site isn’t using Unicode to represent the results, so I cannot do a meaningful copy-pasta.

  7. =8)-DX says

    Some stats that would be interesting would be cummulative wordcount per person commenting.Due to my work I have stats on that for translations I do, 378K words and 2.347 million characters this year alone. It will be thousands and millions more on twitter and blog comments.

    Being on the internet a lot is actually a writing culture, when you think about it.
    =8)-DX

  8. bcw bcw says

    Which reminds me of this:

    Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, “Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?”
    The guard replies, “They are 65,000,011 years old.”
    “That’s an awfully exact number,” says the tourist. “How do you know their age so precisely?”
    The guard answers, “Well, the dinosaur bones were sixty five million years old when I started working here, and that was eleven years ago.”

    … Thus we illustrate the difference between precision and accuracy.

  9. Walter Solomon says

    big @10

    Yes, I looked up the conversion on MathTOOLS but the cuneiform was an image and not a font so I couldn’t paste the results.

    I believe the Babylonians inherited the system from the Sumerians and Akkadians.