• 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