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Minus zero degrees

Congratulations!! ;-)

Have a happy holiday season, and thank you for the time and effort you have put into the one and only minus zero degrees!
 
Beer - not a sip in six months, any alcohol actually. I'm pretty disillusioned with beer anyway. I won't drink Budweiser if it was free. I'm really not one to experiment. I stuck with Heineken, like when I smoked, you enjoy something lime 10% of the pack. Becks is just more bitter. I found an old book on how to make my own. Yeah right.

What exactly does the phrase minus zero degrees supposed to signify? Zero is neither a negative nor positive number. It signifies the absence of quantity. Except in computers. Those damned things. They muck everything up.
 
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What exactly does the phrase minus zero degrees supposed to signify?
* A tad colder than zero degrees.
* More convincing than zero degrees: "It was really freezing here last night, getting as low as minus zero degrees."

Zero is neither a negative nor positive number.
This is what we have to thank our mathematics teachers for; they have no imagination. They need to think 'outside the sphere' and cater for the other universes out there.

I've already told the chief scientists working on fusion power, that if they use -0 in their equations instead of 0, everything will start to make sense.


minus_zero_degrees.jpg
 
Yapanese beer is pretty disgusting. Chinese beer is better.

I sure drank a lot of Kirin and Asahi in my younger days while stationed in Japan. Always thought it to be pretty good. Disgusting is pretty harsh.
 
I'm still lost.
Minus zero degrees is real. In fact, my first doctorate thesis (which was in physics) was based on proving it.

It was a collaborative effort between me and and University of Australia. I reasoned that if a digital thermometer was put in a freezer, then sometime during the period where the thermometer's display transitioned from 0° to -1°, it could be expected that -0° appear for just a few tenths of picosecond.

We used the universities' then state-of-the-art high speed camera, and the photo that I put in post #5 above was the result.

I would have won the Nobel prize for physics, had it not been for the never-ending disagreement in the Academy of Sciences about whether the breakthrough was in physics or mathematics.
 
Hardy har har. With all due respect I think it falls into that same category as the one hand clapping conundrum. Or if a bear without a nose flatulates in the woods ... I'm sure you get the photo.
 
In sign-magnitude number representation, or for that matter in ones' complement notation, minus zero does, in fact, exist.

Plenty of computers used those systems as well. Heck, you even had minus zero on decimal machines, like the 1620.
 
There is a Chinese brand of consumer products called Vbestlife. I think they tried to be better than me.
 
Well yes, they were popular in their day. DEC PDP-1, CDC 6600, 1604; IBM 7090, Univac 1100 series, IBM 1620 and 1401 to name a (very) few. I believe that the Burroughs 5000 and subsequent stack machines were sign-magnitude.

The trick in the CDC hardware (designed by that nobody, Seymour Cray) is that the adder used is really a subtractor, so you complement the minuend before operating to add. This leads to the issue of getting a minus zero as the result of addition very rare. The benefits are a symmetrical number representation (there are just as many negative numbers as positive); logical complementation is exactly the same as arithmetic negation, leading to some interesting properties (such as doing multidigit BCD addition and subtraction with one operation).

Sign-magnitude representations, are of course, naturally this way, as is human written representation (i.e. we don't write negative numbers as their tens' complement).

Oh--and IEEE 754 floating point is sign-magnitude.

Really, you need to broaden your horizons... :)
 
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I sure drank a lot of Kirin and Asahi in my younger days while stationed in Japan. Always thought it to be pretty good. Disgusting is pretty harsh.
Our ship was homeported in Yokosuka and I spent a couple years around Japan. Sapporo was my Japanese beer of choice.

A comment: don't go out drinking with a Japanese sailor and try to find a common language by lots of cold sake in water glasses while laughing and mumbling incoherently. Your head may suffer a bit the next day :)
 
Sign-magnitude representations, are of course, naturally this way, as is human written representation (i.e. we don't write negative numbers as their tens' complement).

Oh--and IEEE 754 floating point is sign-magnitude.

Sign-magnitude was still covered in Comp Org when I went through the CS program at $university. I don't remember if we had to implement anything using it.
 
Many years ago, when deciding on a domain name, I wanted something like google, googleplex, infinity, inifintysquared, minuszero, roundsquare, etc., but they were all taken.

Minus zero degrees was the next best thing.

(I see that sphericalcube.net is available.)
 
Many years ago, when deciding on a domain name, I wanted something like google, googleplex, infinity, inifintysquared, minuszero, roundsquare, etc., but they were all taken.
Maybe if you knew how to spell googol and googolplex properly, those domains wouldn't have been taken. :)
 
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