• Paradoxvoid
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    9 months ago

    Those are so easily commensurable! It’s 1 and 59/64 obv.

    I legit can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

    • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      “wait, what is 5/8 + 3/16 + 1 7/64?”

      In binary it’s 0.101 + 0.0011 + 1.000111, or laid out vertically:

      0.101
      0.0011
      1.000111
      =
      1.111011
      

      Halving numbers is no harder than decimating them, probably easier for most of us. Even computer scientists don’t think of base-10 as The Way The Truth and The Light; they use base-2 or base-16 for various things.

      Decimal/base-ten is fine as a convention, but insisting that One Convention is perfect and others are heretical is stupid.

      • Paradoxvoid
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        9 months ago

        You do you, but if you’re reverting to binary to explain how simple it is to add values together, I think you’ve made a wrong turn somewhere.

        • frightful_hobgoblin@lemmy.ml
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          9 months ago

          halving is a really easy mental operation; we do it all the time mentally and with physical things like bits of food or drink or folding a piece of paper