[–] [deleted] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

[Deleted]

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[–] TheBuddha [S] ago 

See? Zero is all over the place!

Anyone else have any Zeros that they run into?

For the night, I'm mostly going to be over here:

https://voat.co/v/guitar/2248107

Music is math. So, I'm dropping some music tonight. ;-)

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[–] VIP740 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Does anyone remember when they realized 0 doesn't mean the same thing as nothing?

Difference Between Zero and Nothing

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[–] Opieswife 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Ok this was interesting. I haven't really thought about this before but I totally get what the author is trying to say. At first I wasn't sure where he was going but at the end it came together. Looks like I have more reading to do. :)

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[–] VIP740 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

I don't remember when I first came across the distinction, but I do remember the first time I tried to explain it to someone else. It went something like this:

Well zero isn't exactly the same thing as nothing. If you have a graph of y=mx+b there's a point on there where y=0. But with nothing... err, um...

Yeah, I get what you mean, it's not nothing, it's zero. If you have nothing... (scratches head).

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[–] TheBuddha [S] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

The history section of this page may interest you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0

Everyone else, we see the number increase so we know people looked.

Jump in! Question, ask, opine, offer correction, insight, or whatever. Don't worry about being wrong. Just dive in. The water is warm!

I think that's cause someone pissed in it, but it's warm!

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[–] TheBuddha [S] 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

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[–] Opieswife ago 

So I feel like this would make more sense but I am missing a fundamental or two. Can you help so I can reread this again and hopefully make sense of it. I think I am close...

Ok what does floating mean? That you can move essentially on a number like between both positive and negative numbers? Both to what I visualize is to the left and right if zero? Or does this mean something completely different?

Next question I have not seen a double sign before. I don't know how to make it on my keyboard but I am talking about the plus over the mibus sign before the 0.0. Does that mean the 0.0 or whatever number follows can be either positive or negative?

Thanks once I know what these mean I will try reading again and see if I can get further and make more sense out of this.

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[–] VIP740 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

LOL! OK so the computer represents everything with ones and zeros. You have ASCII characters like 'A'=01000001, and '0'=00110000. It's easy to represent positive integers. So in one byte we could store 256 values, which could be interpreted as 0 - 255: 00000000, 00000001, 00000010, 00000011, 00000100... But what if we need to store negative numbers? Well if we add one to 255 (11111111), each digit carries over, leaving eight zeros and a carry that flies off into never never land. So 11111111 can be interpreted as 255, or -1. To change the sign of a binary number you can first not each bit (change zeros to ones and ones to zeroes), and add 1 to the result. Floating point numbers can have fractional values. It's called floating point because we have a section of bits that changes the location of the decimal. Lets say we have four digits and a point to represent a decimal number, like 4329. We could change the size of our numbers by moving the decimal: 4329, 432.9, 43.29, 4.329, .4329. The computer does something like that in binary. The position of the point is determined by the first few bits, and the other bits are interpreted as being multiplied by that power of 2.

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[–] TheBuddha [S] 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Well, we're going to have to start back at what are numbers and work our way out from there! ;-)

I can do that - but it might be slow. I'm going to do a music dump in the guitar sub. But, here's a link to get you started. When you get that, just say so.

http://web.mst.edu/~kosbar/test/ff/elem/typesofnumbers.html

If you'd rather listen to music:

https://voat.co/v/guitar/2248107

(I'm an accomplished musician, my background is in classical guitar but began with percussion instruments. Playing in a band helped me provide extra money.)

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[–] VIP740 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Interesting. I guess that would explain some things about this article, as it's geared toward software developers. Thanks for finding that.

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[–] TheBuddha [S] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Maybe, I'm still not strictly sure what he's on about. That's what prompted me to do more looking.