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- Thread starter Bob McDob
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Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Kilrathi have different numbers of paws depending on the image - my guess would be that they four dexterous fingers plus a useless fifth, like a real cat.
Jason_Ryock
Vice Admiral
Hey Loaf...did you pick UN Resolution 358 at random? Or was there some reason your concerned about violence bloodshed in Cyprus?
If so, should the rest of the CZ people be informed of your true loyalties?
If so, should the rest of the CZ people be informed of your true loyalties?
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I don't think the CZ needs to know about my double-life as a Cyprusian spy.
Delance
Victory, you say?
Bandit LOAF said:
But people keeling telling us on this CZ that they are not real cats!
If they appear with different finger numbers, then maybe the Kilrathi cut their own fingers as an act of loyalty to the emperor, or as a form of punishment. If someone shows up with an extra finger later, it's a cybernetic implant.
The Kilrathi do appear in a few scenes in WC4 (actually, it's just Melek, and boy does he look down on his luck), so you ought to be able to find it on the DVD... I might check myself some time.
Just on general principle, I'm pretty sure the Kilrathi should have an opposable thumb, in order to use technology more easily. We get some pretty good shots of the Kilrathi in the WCA TV series, so maybe you could use that, too (although the WC4 source would be better).
As for the "eighties" = 8^2 = 8x8 = 72 or 8x10 = 80, I'm assuming that the author(s) used "eighties" to mean whatever comes after the eight's place in the Kilrathi number system (the equivalent of our 100's place), since "5 eight-eights and 1 eight " gets kinda old after a while.
Basically, I think "eighties" is just the author's translation for the Kilrathi's version of the word "hundreds", but doesn't necessarily equal 80. It's like saying "oneses and twoses"--it's sorta gibberish. The fact that there actually is an "eighties" in our language (whatever happened to our "sevenies"?) is a coincidence.
Otherwise, I think it'd seem pretty ridiculous that the Kilrathi would give some special place to the number 10, which would be indicated if they used 8x10 in their number system. And I'd also argue against translating it into X 80's and Y 8's, just since that'd be a really odd way to do the translation (it'd be like if I said "X 100's and Y 10's" and somebody translated that as "Q 545's and W 29's").
Just on general mathematical grounds, having a 1, 8, and 80 place value system wouldn't work too well. The problem is that there's a gap between having 8 8's (=72) and 1 80. You'd have to have an 9th digit (0-7 being the first 8) to close the gap between 70 (base 8) = 7x8 (base 10) and 80 (base 10) = 110 (base 8). Note that our decimal system has 10 digits (0-9); by analogy, if we had something as unnatural as an 80's place (a 110's place), we need to have an 11th digit, and only for the case between 10s and 100s. Also, we'd probably be able to express a given number in more than one way (is it 10 or X, where X is our 11th digit = 10?). For all sorts of reasons, such a number system would be really very unelegant, although that's no reason to suppose that the Kilrathi weren't bull-headed enough to use it anyway.
As for how universal place value number systems are, I just wanted to note that those of us in the West also express 5014 as 5 thousands + 1 tens + 4 ones, just like the Japanese.
Note that 5014 is just a short-hand for 5 * 10^3 + 0 * 10^2 + 1 * 10^1 + 4 * 10^0. Also, neglecting the minor point that we say "fourteen" instead of "ten four" (and other contractions for the 10's places like twenties, thirties, etc.), a number like 5123 is pronounced as "5 thousand, 1 hundred, twenty-3".
When I was talking about other number systems, I was really thinking more along the lines of such completely foreign concepts as Roman numerals, where it's not really clear how you go from III to IV, or VIII to IX (the questions being, who chooses these letters, and when you go from one letter to another?).
Just on general principle, I'm pretty sure the Kilrathi should have an opposable thumb, in order to use technology more easily. We get some pretty good shots of the Kilrathi in the WCA TV series, so maybe you could use that, too (although the WC4 source would be better).
As for the "eighties" = 8^2 = 8x8 = 72 or 8x10 = 80, I'm assuming that the author(s) used "eighties" to mean whatever comes after the eight's place in the Kilrathi number system (the equivalent of our 100's place), since "5 eight-eights and 1 eight " gets kinda old after a while.
Basically, I think "eighties" is just the author's translation for the Kilrathi's version of the word "hundreds", but doesn't necessarily equal 80. It's like saying "oneses and twoses"--it's sorta gibberish. The fact that there actually is an "eighties" in our language (whatever happened to our "sevenies"?) is a coincidence.
Otherwise, I think it'd seem pretty ridiculous that the Kilrathi would give some special place to the number 10, which would be indicated if they used 8x10 in their number system. And I'd also argue against translating it into X 80's and Y 8's, just since that'd be a really odd way to do the translation (it'd be like if I said "X 100's and Y 10's" and somebody translated that as "Q 545's and W 29's").
Just on general mathematical grounds, having a 1, 8, and 80 place value system wouldn't work too well. The problem is that there's a gap between having 8 8's (=72) and 1 80. You'd have to have an 9th digit (0-7 being the first 8) to close the gap between 70 (base 8) = 7x8 (base 10) and 80 (base 10) = 110 (base 8). Note that our decimal system has 10 digits (0-9); by analogy, if we had something as unnatural as an 80's place (a 110's place), we need to have an 11th digit, and only for the case between 10s and 100s. Also, we'd probably be able to express a given number in more than one way (is it 10 or X, where X is our 11th digit = 10?). For all sorts of reasons, such a number system would be really very unelegant, although that's no reason to suppose that the Kilrathi weren't bull-headed enough to use it anyway.
As for how universal place value number systems are, I just wanted to note that those of us in the West also express 5014 as 5 thousands + 1 tens + 4 ones, just like the Japanese.
Note that 5014 is just a short-hand for 5 * 10^3 + 0 * 10^2 + 1 * 10^1 + 4 * 10^0. Also, neglecting the minor point that we say "fourteen" instead of "ten four" (and other contractions for the 10's places like twenties, thirties, etc.), a number like 5123 is pronounced as "5 thousand, 1 hundred, twenty-3".When I was talking about other number systems, I was really thinking more along the lines of such completely foreign concepts as Roman numerals, where it's not really clear how you go from III to IV, or VIII to IX (the questions being, who chooses these letters, and when you go from one letter to another?).
