3102: Reading a Big Number

Reading a Big Number

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Title text: [desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???

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Explanation

This is one of 52 incomplete explanations: This page was created recently. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

this comic expresses Randall's frustration when reading large numbers. it starts with normal digits and commas you would find in a large number, but gradually becomes more and more chaotic.

Thought	Explanation
54! Great! I know that number. Solid start.	A simple start
Oh, a comma and some zeros. Cool. Must be at least 54 thousand.	Underselling how long the number is with the "at least a thousand", but is a fair thought from the POV of not being able to know how long the number is.
A second comma! I wonder if we're talking population or money.	Excitement from how large the number must be. Money and population are both often measured in millions.
Yikes! If this is money, it's a lot of money.	Three commas means a number in the billions. Money can be measured in billions, but that's a lot of money even for a government or major corporation.
Why am I reading this? Whatever this number is, I'm not going to be able to visualize it.	Five commas is a number in the quadrillions. At this point the number is too big for human minds to comprehend.
All right, either someone made a unit conversion error or this is one of those incomprehensible astronomy numbers.	Astronomy often deals with extremely large numbers due to the incredible scale of the universe. For example, the distance to the Andromeda galaxy in kilometers could be numbered in quintillions. Alternatively, the person calculating the number made a mistake.
Oh no. Is this a misplaced comma or an extra zero? I guess we'll see if the next group has two zeros or three. If it's two, we can at least hope the digits are right.	Commas are supposed to be placed every three digits, so something is wrong. However, it might simply be that someone moved the comma to the right, meaning that this group has four digits and the next one will have two.
Oh no.	A second group of four zeroes means it's not a typo. Something is seriously wrong. Note that some countries like China or Japan may use 4 digit groupings, but not in conjunction with 3 digit groupings.
What is happening.	Big Numbers are normally rounded, so it's very strange to see a non-zero value this far down in the place values. Also, "54" matches the digits at the start of the number so it could indicate the number was copied incorrectly. The non-zero digits here imply that all of the digits so far, including the zeroes, are significant figures; the number is not only extremely large, but implausibly precise.
Someone messed up real bad.	The arcsecond mark " indicates that this number is an angle or a distance in inches. For an angle, even accounting for how small an arcsecond is (1/3600th of a degree), this angle would be countless rotations. As for inches, it would represent a distance much larger than the observable universe, it is also uncommon to use customary units like inches in conjunction with large numbers. Alternatively, this could be "to-the-11th-power", which would make the already extremely large number extremely ridiculously big.
Someone messed up real bad and I hope it wasn't me.	Numbers normally only use the digits 0-9. The use of letters suggest that this is a hexadecimal number. Angles are not normally expressed in hexadecimal. Hexadecimal is mostly used by computers, so Randall, as a programmer, might be worried that the hexadecimal appearing is his fault. Seeing a long string of unexpected characters may indicate a memory bug, such as a buffer overflow. These bugs can lead to crashes, data corruption and security vulnerabilities, and Randall would rather not be responsible for it.
(title text) [desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???	Since the final number is unreadable and potentially infinite, this implies that Randall has, naturally, made up an explanation instead of trying to figure out what was really happening.

Transcript

This is one of 27 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

Thought Process While Reading a Big Number

54,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000,0000,054,000"000,00c2ef46 [continuing off the edge of the comic]

[At various points on the number, a line is connected from the number to a note]

[Before first comma] 54! Great! I know that number. Solid start.
[After first comma] Oh, a comma and some zeros. Cool. Must be at least 54 thousand.
[After second comma] A second comma! I wonder if we're talking population or money.
[After third comma] Yikes! If this is money, it's a lot of money.
[After fifth comma] Why am I reading this? Whatever this number is, I'm not going to be able to visualize it.
[After sixth comma] All right, either someone made a unit conversion error or this is one of those incomprehensible astronomy numbers.
[After seventh comma (first group of 4 zeros)] Oh no. Is this a misplaced comma or an extra zero? I guess we'll see if the next group has two zeros or three. If it's two, we can at least hope the digits are right.
[After eighth comma (second group of 4 zeros)] Oh no.
[After ninth comma (second 54)] What is happening.
[By quotation mark] Someone messed up real bad.
[By mixed alphanumeric numbers] Someone messed up real bad and I hope it wasn't me.

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Discussion

avrayter how do you add links Avrayter (talk) 12:27, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Is the final character a 6, or is it a theta? 2A02:F6E:A36E:0:F0F1:E624:A18C:EDC2 14:05, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

The across line is curvy, so most likely a "6". SDSpivey (talk) 14:14, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

I would have to fire any programmer that output hex in lowercase (or put commas in triplets for hex). SDSpivey (talk) 14:14, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

You may be firing about half of the programmers then :) I don't think there is a rule here, both forms are common, but I guess that there are holy wars to fight. 90.73.80.27 15:41, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't care how it is stored in source code, either decimal, hex, binary, etc., upper or lower is fine. The output on screen, if hex, should always be in upper case. If grouped, hex is in groups of 4 and never commas. SDSpivey (talk) 12:58, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

r/unexpectedfactorial Randall Monroe, shame on you! 50.195.132.249 (talk) 14:58, 13 June 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Surely this is just one line of a CSV file... 86.144.197.52 15:51, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

That is actually a strong justification!! I'd like to see the headers, tho xD 2806:106e:19:81f2:fc2c:11d2:79fa:615c (talk) 16:31, 13 June 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Also an unusual and possibly broken CSV. 000 values are uncommon (they are usually just 0), and the " (or '') may be used for quoting. There is no way to tell how it will parse as CSV is not a well defined format. There is a standard, RFC 4180, but it is not always followed. 90.73.80.27 18:03, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

could be CSFWV = comma-separated-and-fixed-width-values where the values are also 0-padded so that it works in both their CSV parsers and their fixed-width parsers for compatibility. 74.202.210.170 19:19, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Remember, kids: always end your strings with a NUL 93.36.184.28 15:56, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

By my reckoning, if you set a 78RPM record playing, and waited for it to have spun the amount of arcseconds specified (by that point in the "number", you'd be waiting a tad over 7 billion times the current age of the universe. I might have erred by a magnifude or three (forgot if I divided number of days down to get number of years, etc, and I much prefer to work with Long Scale billions, so maybe I did it slightly wrong when working with the inferior kind), but... Well, it doesn't really matter quite so much, I suspect. ;) 82.132.246.216 17:11, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

I remember, years ago, seeing calculators using single quotes as thousands-separators. But never a double-quote. Interestingly, the C++ standard (as of the 2014 release) permits single-quote characters as an arbitrary digit separator for numeric literals. They are ignored by the compiler, but can be useful for making code more readable (e.g. every 3 decimal digits or every 4 hex digits). See also https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/integer_literal.html. Shamino (talk) 19:02, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Apart from the quotation mark, this still matches [my hex number regex](https://stackoverflow.com/a/76696505/6743127). Fabian42 (talk) 19:22, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Oooh, looks like an IPv9 address, but they're using ',' instead of '🕴️' to separate triplets for some reason. The clusters with an extra leading 0 indicate that they're in octal instead of base64. -- Angel (talk) 21:26, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

Randall, how in tarnations did you find out my password? 08:38, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

If you turn #c2ef46 into a color https://www.perbang.dk/rgb/c2ef46/, it's a brilliant lime green. Dogman15 (talk) 10:05, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

If you add the decimal representation of the RGB color, you get 503 - awfully close to 504.Lopped (talk) 14:38, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Does that mean this is a brat number? 82.13.184.33 15:57, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

The RGB is meaningless in this case as it's #00c2ef46 meaning that it's fully transparent. 2001:1C02:1A9D:9700:51CF:BA7C:200D:2C3F 17:52, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

Wait, why does the table jump straight from billions to quadrillions? Where's trillions? Is this an error or one of those UK-vs-US-billion situations? 185.231.139.156 18:34, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Oh! It's because the comic doesn't comment on the 'trillions' comma. I get it now. It's 'cause I'm dumb. 185.231.139.156 18:37, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

LOL, nice recovery! Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 16:05, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

I always start at the right and work to the left. So then when I actually start reciting what the number is, I know if it's quintillions – or whatever – that I'm dealing with. Yorkshire Pudding (talk) 11:01, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

People always read numbers RTL. Just check yourself. 185.7.43.114 (talk) 14:25, 16 June 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Seems to me that the table format is appropriate, given the three kinds of info (number group, comic's comment, explanation). But I don't think it makes sense to have the table sortable. BunsenH (talk) 17:04, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

That's interesting, the sorting is the only reason I could come up with for using a table instead of a list. A table is much less accessible than a list, doesn't work on phones, is harder to maintain, and I don't think it's needed here. I just converted a random table in the latest comic that was just NUMBER - RANDALL'S TEXT - EXPLANATION. I just don't see why this wiki is in love with tables. --FaviFake (talk) 20:53, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

The table format nicely organizes and separates the three data elements for each item. If it was just "item" and "explanation", I'd agree that the list format would be better. But for three elements, the only list setup I can think of that would make any sense would be "number group" (bold) and then two bulleted lines for the comic's comment and the explanation... considerably less clear, I think.

The table is a lot more work to set up than the list would be, but I don't see it as being particularly more difficult to maintain. BunsenH (talk) 22:17, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

Sure, i guess in this case it's fine. I removed the notice. --FaviFake (talk) 09:01, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

It's worth noting that all the weirdness added together, there would actually be a valid scenario for this number... it possibly being an angle, the high levels of precision, the value being larger than the observable universe, hexadecimal notation after the angle notation (if we assume afterwards is a unit notated by a memory address indicating a programmatically-invented unit in a system with an extended form of memory addresses, possibly 3 sets of 4... which might be a neccesarry alteration if attempted to calculate nonobservable universe properties, but that would imply there is a missing number off panel) could be consistent with trying to mathematically explore possibilities for the shape & topology of the unobservable universe. However, directly storing memory access locations rather than references with a number implies a necessity of extreme speed over readability of code... and the concept of a situation where extreme speed in calculating the topography of the nonobservable universe is of the utmost importance is a concerning situation indeed.

2601:600:CB00:2080:BF41:F9D:5B90:8849 22:51, 20 June 2025 (UTC)
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54,000,000,000,000,000,000,0000,0000,054,000"000,00c2ef46