Terminalcoffee discussion

Am I wrong, or is MCMXC just a longer way of writing MXM?

It was the copyright year listed at the end of the Welcome To Jury Duty video. The information is still relevant but the hair styles and clothes were a little distracting.

Bouffant hair and wide ties?

And yes, you're right, but I had to write it down to figure it out, instead of on the fly the way you did.

*admires Sarah*

It's mostly aesthetic, I think. Roman numerals are not set in stone (unless you visit Roman ruins or something) but they do have some odd conventions that lengthen the numbers beyond the general rules, usually for looks or to make them more noticeable, like using IIII instead of IV on a cuckoo clock to balance the VIII visually on the other side.

Jammies wrote: "Bouffant hair and wide ties?"

Big perms with bangs, coke-bottle-thick glasses, acid-washed jeans.

I appreciate being admired for obsessive puzzle solving.

this certainly is not a quandary i thought i would be quandaring

Why not MCMLXL?

Sarah Pi wrote: "Am I wrong, or is MCMXC just a longer way of writing MXM?"

The longer version looks more familiar, but the shorter one seems understandable too. I guess it makes sense that there could be more than one way to write certain numbers in the Roman system, since it's both additive and subtractive, but I don't know if there are (or were) rules specifying preferred methods for formulating these things. It's interesting.

The only rules I remember is that a numeral isn't supposed to be repeated more than 3 times in a row and a numeral preceding another in order to modify it cannot be worth less than ten.

Amber wrote: "The only rules I remember is that a numeral isn't supposed to be repeated more than 3 times in a row and a numeral preceding another in order to modify it cannot be worth less than ten."

So how does that explain IV or IX?

I should add "if the number being modified is greater than 10." I haven't studied this stuff since middle school.

Hollywood!

::rolls eyes::

I think what Amber is saying is that the larger number can't be greater than 10 times the smaller number.

Basically, you can't put V or I before anything higher than ten to reduce it. I think.

i love this convo and i can add nothing. please continue

Cyril wrote: "I think what Amber is saying is that the larger number can't be greater than 10 times the smaller number."

I think that may be a rule that keeps the XM from being common usage. It's not the rule I was going for, but it sounds right. And I think I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Roman numerals today.