New material pushes the boundary of blackness

There's a place where fractions are more meaningful than decimals, and vice versa. For example, I'd much rather refer to a 7/16 inch bolt that way.

Good vernier calipers are getting hard to find with fractional scales, although they've brought out electronic calipers with fractions now, oddly enough. Must do a bit of rounding I guess.

Jordan

The means "grin," which I used in this case because I said "small fraction" after you complained about people using fractions.

As for the rest of the world, I don't see any shortage of the use of fractions in news stories from around the rest of the world, either. A headline from Xinhua today read "1/10 of young Chinese netizens suffer Internet addiction." From ShareCast, UK: "Interactive media and games group Yoomedia is sharply higher in percentage terms - albeit only up one-twentieth of a penny in money terms -..."

People all over understand fractions. They even teach it in school.

-- Ed Huntress

Try them with "only 0.53% of people regularly scratch their itches with a frog gig," or something like that. Half a dollar is 50% of a dollar. I said "decimal percentages."

-- Ed Huntress

Yes they do get that far but when it comes to making change if you give them a dolar and 3 cents for a 78 cent purchase it causes total breakdown on some of them. :-) ...lew...

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:05:13 -0700, with neither quill nor qualm, Lew Hartswick quickly quoth:

I do that so I get a quarter back. I love it when the drone tries to give me two dimes and a nickel (or some other odd change) back after searching their brains since that particular cash register didn't do the math for them. I feel very lucky to be me when that happens.

I don't go into McDognuts but I understand that they have cash registers with no numbers on them. They have pictures of each item and the drone presses the button however many times they want it to add that item. I suppose it allows them to use high school grads and illegal or legal aliens who speak/read/write no English or comprehend no (lower?) math.

Ah, my America!

"Lew Hartswick" wrote: Yes they do get that far but when it comes to making change if you give them a dolar and 3 cents for a 78 cent purchase it causes total breakdown on some of them. :-) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ You're supposed to give them the extra 3 cents BEFORE they enter in into the register, and then the computer solves it for them. But if you do it too late, the amount of change showing is 72 cents, and the 3 cents you are trying to proffer just boggles their mind. To solve the problem they would have to call the manager and have the transaction voided out so they can start over. Can't you see how hard this is?

"100% certified 0x0000"? Where do you come up with this nonsense?

Black color of a pixel is represented by a zero. I hope that you have learned something today.