Well, she can't not demonstrate she knows the solutions for basic math.
Transcript
Idrisah: Is that binary counting?? Avians do something similar…
Talita: Yeah… Though I’m cheating to take it higher than 15…
She swaps between the 0 and 16 fist positions.
Gillie grins at Talita.
Gillie: (ASL) What’s 2 plus 2?
Talita: Uh...
She hesitantly holds up her hand with the binary position 0010.
Talita: (sign) …4?
Gillie grins wider.
Gillie: (ASL) What’s 4 times 2?
Talita: (sign) 8.
Gillie: (ASL) What’s 30 minus 5 times 4 divided by 11?
42 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 185”
JoB
All the talk about recurring decimals aside, the proper method to give the result in a strictly integer-based system (like Talitas binary counting here) is to give it as a fraction – either “310/11” (PEDMAS) or “100/11” (left-to-right). The latter can be signed with two hands, if you add a sign meaning “fraction” or “divided by”. I’d hope that that’s what Gillie is trying to get at.
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Another possibility would be “28 remainder 2” / “9 remainder 1” (… where, technically, you’d have to clarify that the reminder comes from an attempt to divide by 11 …). Here, both can be done with two/one of Talitas hands and one extra sign.
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Of course, there also is the possibilty that Talita’ll go “what the heck are you trying there??”. The crucial question becoming whether she’ll say or sign it, I suppose …
JoB
(… aaaaand it’s “PEMDAS”, not “PEDMAS”. Sorry, lost in translation (of the German “point before stroke“) …)
SIGSTKFLT
Talita gonna invent floating-point
JoB
[pulls a Stitch and pops out an infinity-mirror-looking series of ever-smaller hands for the decimals]
Hunter
Putting fucking PEMDAS in a webcomic how dare you (I don’t know the answer)
Planetfall
errr…. 28 point something?
Dicemonger
Hmm.. That is true for the problem written out. But I wonder, when a math problem is spoken out, should you just take it in order? So the answer is 9.09 recurring? (((30 – 5) * 4) / 11)
Planetfall
Oh yeah, Thats a good point. Huh.
JoB
> So the answer is 9.09 recurring?
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Is that how it’s said in English? Because that fails to differentiate between, e.g., 298/33 = 9.030303… and 271/30 = 9.033333… . In German, the keyword (“Periode”) goes between the non-repeating and the repeating part.
thegriffin88
And this is the part of the hard science where my brain just goes “Keep reading, don’t try to understand. You failed 5th grade math.”
And I’m not sorry. I hate math. 😤
hessian
gillie is such a great teacher, starting with talita’s confidence and meetong her where she’s at
Stray Cat
Ah, the puzzle was maths all along.
Joking aside, interesting to see mention of how Avians do a similar form of finger-counting. With how few fingers their hands have, they’d have to think up other methods – and if humans can think of a bunch of different ways of finger-counting, other sophonts certainly can.
JoB
Well, Avians have two hands with two fingers each, so, if using the exact same method as Talita, their two hands allow them to count exactly as far as Talita with one.
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However, given that they’ve been a technology-using species for quite some time, chances are that they have switched to something other than counting with their few fingers – like humans readily adopted abacus’ and calculators, once those had been invented, surplus of fingers or not.
oh6
This reminds me of _A Man Without Words_, where the adult deaf man who had never learned sign language (sort of) was initially mystified by the teacher’s attemps to teach sign, but quickly picked up arithmetic. What’s holding back Talita is entirely different of course.
SheTheTDE
Someone gets easily excited when numbers are involved
SheTHE TDE
Oh wait she’s probably excited to be having her first conversation entirely with sign language
Appleeatinggoat
Looking at her in the last panel is so awesome. She’s so happy!!
blythe
i like how she asks if its 4
Rose
Gillieeeeeeee, omg she’s BEAMING in the last panel! she’s so happy to be actually talking with Talita!
Vinemaple
Oh, shoot, again: what Gillie is REALLY doing, whatever the math is, is having a conversation with Talita in sign language! You’ve done this before, haven’t you, Gillie?
Ruby
I mean, she’s a linguist, isn’t she? Surely she’s picked up some trick to introduce people to sign language
malmo
oh! I’ve just noticed the speech bubble type is square when she signs the numbers.
Qwertystop
That and to make it clear to Talita that she can in fact make understandable gestures clearly and quickly and hopefully help get past the dysphoria a bit.
enemy
THEYRE SO CUTE I LOVE THEM SO MUCH
Amanda/OwlBear
There are so many ways you could interpret that equation, fairly sure none of them will produce an integer between 0 and 16, Gillie has got to be taking the piss
Teod
She is indeed taking the piss. But also ((30 – 5) × 4) ÷ 11 = 100 ÷ 11 = ~9
Tyrone
Should be easier to sign than my result of 34,98776
winged monkey
Unless you it write it out as spoken, without parenthesis, in which case, if you Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, equals 28.182? (I think? Math was never my strongest subject.)
Vinemaple
I had the theory Gillie was trying to trick Talita into hand-spelling something, but she’s a linguist, not a mathematician, at least that we’ve seen, and that paint-splatter background behind her… This is about Gillie creating chaos for the lulz. Adorkably.
Undercooked Mothman
Talita’s 9 does look a lot like asl’s Y…
DasGanon
Helpfully Jay has actually secretly posted an Adapted ASL comic, but none of these signs line up to those signs.
https://jayrockin.tumblr.com/post/666752955492581376/gillie-helps-talita-adapt-the-asl-alphabet-and#notes
Calypso
I suspect this takes place soon before those signs are invented. This comic seems to be earlier on the timeline compared to a lot of the bonus lore.
Appleeatinggoat
According to my calculations, somewhere about 28
Septemberdale
Now I’m curious about Avian counting.
ttt
firstly, the pure JOY on gillie’s face to be able to directly communicate without using an app.
secondly, i never know whether to treat a string of ‘spoken’ math equations as an order of operations based on which number came first, or to apply PEMDAS once the entire equation is expressed (which, ugh, thats a lot of memorization). if the former, ~9.09. if the latter, ~28.18.
Vinemaple
There’s an entire social media thread arguing about a specific equation, it keeps getting screenshotted and infecting platform after platform. It works differently on different calculators, and is apparently expressed ambiguously. OH SHOOT! That’s probably what Gillie is doing! She’s meming!
Amanda/OwlBear
the main problem with that equation (the one that gets spread around) is it uses ÷, which are ambiguous because different people learn to do either division or multiplication first, the real answer is that outside of very very basic maths all division is expressed as fractions, and fractions in equations are much more easy to deal with
Gillie here is using the same trick to cause problems
BullCityFats
It’s not really a problem with this equation because the division sign is at the end. No matter how you interpret this, …(5 times 4) divided by 11 or …5 times (4 divided by 11), you get the same answer. If it were …5 divided by 4 times 11, associativity would be a problem. (5 divided by 4) times 11 is 55/4, while 5 divided by (4 times 11) is 5/44.
llearch
According to how I was taught (many, many moons ago – so if I’m wrong, it’s due to memory failure over the years), pemdas or bodmas, whichever, was technically bo(dm)(as), and grouped tasks were of equal priority; equal priority meant process from left to right in order.
So brackets take priority, and the above equation with no brackets would result in 30 – 5 x 4 / 11, which merges down to 30 – ((5 x 4) / 11), according to my understanding of the rules. Which, as other people have mentioned is 28.18 recurring.
… which might take a wee while to sign – since I presume Talita can manage the math side just fine, what with her training and all. Although I don’t know how she’s going to sign the decimal point, yet.
‘course, I think I might be putting too much effort into calculating the answers and not enough into following the story, as it were. ;-]
Enai
I treat it as “execute the operations in the order they’re spoken”, because otherwise you’d have to hold all the numbers and operations in your short-term memory until the last term is said, then sort by operations order using even more short-term memory, then calculate. Unless there are three or less numbers in the equation, you quickly run up against the limits of the average human brain and that’s just unkind to do to someone when just having a conversation.
.
Unless you’re doing a mental math competition. Then the agreed upon rules apply, of course, and if your brains won’t brain that way, well, that’s what happens in competitions.
Claire
I’d like to see you represent a repeating decimal on your hands, Gillie
EveryZig314
I mean there’s presumably ASL for “repeating” much like there’s an English word for it