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Cake day: February 24th, 2025

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  • Ava@lemmy.blahaj.zonetomemes@lemmy.worldMath
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    18 hours ago

    “Base” is the number of distinct integers you have in play. In Base 10, there are ten of them. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You can think of the numeric representation 10 as “1 ten, and 0 ones.”

    In Base 2 (binary) the only two digits available are 0 and 1. The first four binary numbers are 0, 1, 10, 11, which represent zero, one, two, and three. In Base 2, “10” means “1 two, and 0 ones.” But, “Base 2” can’t be written in binary, there’s no concept of 2! Indeed, the way we reflect two in binary is 10. Which means, when we’re talking in binary, “Base 2” is written as “Base 10.”

    This holds true for EVERY base. In Base 4, we have the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3. So if we want a value of four, we need to write it as 10. “1 four, 0 ones”. So, when we’re talking in Base 4, the way to say “Base 4” is ALSO by saying “Base 10”!

    The trick behind it is that numbers written don’t have context-free meaning. You can’t communicate what “10” means without knowing how many distinct digits your conversational partner is working with. Most people have centralized on base 10, but there’s no inherent advantage to doing things that way. Indeed, it’s kind of awkward in lots of ways. Consider Base 12 (the digits of which are most often 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, as an aside). In Base 12, you can easily divide your base numbers by 1, 2, 3, 4. That’s SUPER handy, since we obviously break things up into groups of 3 and 4 pretty often in our daily lives, but that’s pretty painful in Base 10 because you immediately run into the need for fractions.




  • While it’s <10% across the entire population, LGBTQ identification rates are at 23% for GenZ. https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx

    But the reason it’s an issue for many is that people don’t really say “normal” to refer to things like sexuality, gender, etc. in a “statistically most likely” way, they use it specifically to exclude the other group from being considered normal as something lesser. Or, to put it another way…

    Let’s be honest here. a high percentage of the time that someone categorizes something (implicitly or explicitly) as “abnormal” it is done with intent to label the subject as something undesirable. It’s pretty safe to say that if a term is very often used in a negative way in a specific context, then we can reasonably assume that default definition when that’s the context we’re in. I don’t understand why people are so often afraid to acknowledge that we don’t live in a world of pure definitions, and rather must exist in a situation where the context of a statement is relevant.