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Currently on hiatus :-(
 S&W in German/auf DeutschGaia (my fantasy comic) Scarlet (my science fantasy comic) |
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![[1291] Don’t Shut Me Down!](/comics/2021-09-09-1291-dont-shut-me-down.png "[1291] Don’t Shut Me Down!")
- Sandra: The two new ABBA songs are great.
- Larisa: Yeah!
- Sandra: Imagine what it’d be like to play in a band like that!
- Sandra: Boys that faint just because you look at them for a second!
- Larisa: And there’s only one tiny little thing that stands between us and stardom!
- Sandra: Which is?
- Larisa: There are approximately six billion people who can sing better than us.
- Sandra: That’s an optimistic estimation…
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Sandra and Woo by Oliver Knörzer is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the About page for details.
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Didn’t stop Bob Dylan.
It’s not all about talent. It’s a lot about presentation.
Get a YouTube channel, dress up, sing a bit, see how that goes.
If you can actually write songs, you have a chance.
Beyond that, practice.
Inigo Montoya : Let’s go.
Fezzik : Where?
Inigo Montoya : Find the man in black obviously.
Fezzik : But don’t you know where he is.
Inigo Montoya : Don’t bother me with trifles. After 20 years, at last my father’s soul will be at peace. There will be blood tonight!
The Princess Bride. I think it will be very well with the strip 🙂
Surely they have heard of Auto-tune?
@ arGyle:
hey man was a good poet don’t diss him
@ Girishwaran M: He wasn’t a good singer though. Maybe he should have written the songs and had others perform them for the full effect.
Thank you for bringing my attention to this! I remember ABBA from my childhood. This…is like a dream.
I was just humming the chords in my head as I loaded the site. Great performance (ABBA that is, not me)
@ Girishwaran M:
Yeah, but he sounded like a goose trying to pass a horse chestnut.
@ Sllimkered:
Dang, you beat me to it! But they’d probably also need Auto-Rhythm, and Auto-Emote, and…
arGyle wrote:
My mom would have said, “Or Cher,” although I didn’t think that was quite fair. I don’t like her singing, but she can sing.
Hawk is right. Dylan can’s sing his way out of a wet paper sack.
I didn’t know than the english are so pathetic in maths.
1.000.000.000 In spanish Mil millones. In english Billion
1.000.000.000.000 In spanish Billón. In english Billion
They can’t count more than 1.000.000.000. How something can think in english like the computer language. If it is maths.
Sllimkered wrote:
Auto-Tune: A sophisticated audio-processing system that lets talentless singers sound like talentless robots.
Alan Richmon wrote:
Oh, no, no, no, it isn’t that easy. Did you really think it would be that easy? In English, a billion is both of those things. It depends on the person you talk to.
(But there are other languages that do use only the short naming system.)
On the other hand, if you think a billion is the biggest named number, perhaps English has nothing to worry about. Not to mention maths barely uses any of those silly names: “ten to the ninth” and “ten to the twelfth” are easier to reason about and shorter to write (in numeric notation).
@ CrazyCatGuy:
Auto-tune is also bad because it enforces an unnatural ideal of “perfection”. It edits the singers voice so that the pitch of the notes follows equal temperament. However, the natural way of singing doesn’t do this. A good singer sings in intonation with notes that are sounding at the same time. This means that the exact pitch sung is very seldom exactly the pitch that should theoretically be given in equal temperament to the note written on the sheet music. This freedom is inherent for singing, because the voice is not in need of being tempered. Auto-tune takes it away.
If you are interested in the topic of singing intonation , this article by Frank Havrøy is an enlightening read.
Chortos-2 wrote:
Yes. There is octodecillion for example, but mathematicians prefer to say 10^57 or 10^108 …
You think singing like Abba is gonna bring boys to your feet? Sorry, not sorry, but if you sing like them, the only people at your feet are gonna be middle aged mothers drunk off wine at their book clubs
@ Chortos-2:
@ HKMaly:
There are number so great like infinite or so little like infinitesimal, but other languages have mayor number without the use of numeric.
In spanish there are Trillones, Cuatrillones (very easy, only put an ordinal before -illones)
I’m thinking the same. Not good mathematicians at english mathematicians.
These days, you just have to autotune the hell out of your voice, then repeat the same sentence four or five times and call it a “chorus.”
Alan Richmon wrote:
We have those words as well, only a trillion is 10^12, a quadrillion is 10^15, a quintillion is 10^18, and so on. Historically, UK usage was the same as modern Spanish/German usage, but that’s basically died out.
@ Raen:
And having these why don’t use it?
Really how you say 10^12? It’s not a number. It’s good to work with maths but isn’t a word.
Alan Richmon wrote:
In maths, you say “ten to the twelfth”. (You did start by talking about maths.)
But in non-mathematical contexts, there’s rarely any need for naming huge numbers at all. But when I do need to name 10^12 in a casual conversation—which does sometimes happen—well, I call it a “trillion”. And when I need to name 10^21—which happens considerably more rarely—I call it a “sextillion”. (You would call it a “thousand trillion”.)
I don’t really see what the issue is. We all have names for all the powers of 1000 that we’re ever realistically gonna need a name for, and indeed many more. In my opinion, the only problem is when a single language uses (or has recently used) both schemes. And, of course, it would be totally splendid if all languages that use these words used the same scheme; but at the end of the day, it’s just another instance of false friends to be aware of during translation.
To recap:
Alan Richmon wrote:
Trillion.
I don’t know what you mean by “not using” the words.
HKMaly wrote:
and the UNDUCCILLION which is a TRILLION times a TRILLION, times a TRILLION (a number followed by 36 zeros).
Why would anyone need such a silly number?
The new Internet Protocol #6… it has 34 unduccilions of IP addresses.
To give you an idea of how much of an improvement that is over the Internet Protocol #4 it is replacing…
Imagine a dump truck full of sand… IP#4 could provide an IP address for each grain of sand in it.
IP#6 provides an address for every grain of sand in every desert and every beach in the world with enough left over for every blade of grass in Europe.
They’re not wrong. The two new ABBA songs are really good. I went and listened to them because of this strip, so thanks for bringing that to my attention.
@ Chortos-2:
Because 10^12 is read, how you said, ten to the twelth (five words) non practical. Is more Trillion.
When you use this numbers? Macroeconomy, data storage (a terabyte in bytes [it have use])…
You can’t say in a plenary session our anual budget will be 4×10^12 and 25×10^6 euros. It´s ridiculous
And there are more numbers so biggers
Ah, and 10^12 is Billion, no trillion. 1.000.000.000.000 (12 0). Trillon will be 10^24 (or you are sayin that Mil millones in spanish are Billions and Billon are Trillon)
@ Valkeiper2020:
A trilion (if are a Trillon) 1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 (24 0s)
If you do one trilion x one trilion x one trilion you must do 24^3 0s. In that case the number will be 10^13.824
When the NASA put it first man in space orbit a minimal error of digits could cost the life of this man. To many counts (in higher studies, let’s be honest) there are operations with millions or more 0s
That may be true, but that never stopped me.
… we don’t have a band.
Shut up, me!
Alan Richmon wrote:
No, a trillion is not 10^24 in any language and any scale. On the short scale (the only scale in Russian, Arabic and many other languages and countries, and the most popular in English today), it is 10^12. On the long scale (the only scale in Spanish and many other languages), it is 10^18: https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/trill%C3%B3n
I have no idea what your goal is any more. You seem to imply that words must always mean the same thing in different languages (and that your language is the correct one), you make unfounded comments about supposed inability to name big numbers, and you don’t even know your own scale that you’re trying to defend (not that anyone is attacking it). Please just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scale.
Powree, I’d love it if you would re-draw Panel 2 (the girls in abba uniforms) large and full color.
@ Chortos-2:
No, I said that a language must be a simple style to speak in numbers that you can use.
And a Trillion must be the next to billion (if we talk about a million of millions). So a trillion must be a billion of billions (that means this scale. The next step must be a number of times this number) It’s basic maths. If a billion are 12 0s (3 for thousands, 3 for millions, 3 for thousand millions [that you say billions] and 3 for billions [really]] Ergo trillion must be 24 0s (the previous stage two times to arrive this)
I haven’t even said my language must be the maths’ language but i see ridiculous that a language without any basic math vocabulary (not math language used only to make maths otherwise can talk usually with it) can be the basic math vocabulary or dependant languages (like computer science)
@ Alan Richmon:
Pretty sure English has plenty decent math vocabulary. At least for any practical use. If you disagree you probably just haven’t learned it all yet.
But like, what does it matter what the vocab is for maths anyway? When you’re working at that scale it’s all written numbers anyway. It’s pedantic to worry about the terms.
Their singing is so bad that the rest of the human population is better by comparison?!?! Yikes, they’re gonna need singing lessons if over six billion people sound better than them…😅 I wouldn’t call that a tiny little thing however, more like a colossal thing. I wonder how well Cloud’s singing voice sounds. Is he a good singer, especially compared to Sandra and Larisa? I guess if humans were the songbird classification of avians, Sandra and Larisa would be crows/ravens/corvids.
Can we take a moment to appreciate their brilliant mastery of the Wall of Sound?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKsUSjcsgII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHU48c-dtqk
@ Kazuma Taichi:
Like i said before there are many times when you use than large maths in life and in spoken language.
It’s dumb you think the spoken maths are only for little numbers
Alan Richmon wrote:
The fact that you don’t seem to know what “trillón” (in English, quintillion, a million million million – NOT “billón billones,” a trillion trillions, which would be a “cuadrillón” in Spanish because 2+2=4, or a septillion in English) means in your own language casts doubt on how often you use it.
You pay too much attention to appearances, not big picture. And the big picture is: nothing that wasn’t here before back in 1980-s or even earlier. If it looks uglier, that’s just some more paint peeling away. The increase in size and stench happens not because the beast gets any more muscular or even closer. It’s bloating of decay.
In this sense, it’s an amazing time.