Brevity by Dan Thompson for July 07, 2020

NEGATIVE zero??

Less than zero? Wow!

Bet he’s careful in winter when the salt trucks are out!

How did he catch him?

Now I know where this snail was going. https://www.gocomics.com/half-full/2020/07/07

Wanna Drag?

That officer looks a little sluggish!

Speed limit in conformance with IEEE 754. Nice…

To be really, REALLY technical, . . .

In computer science there are two hardware design options for representing a signed binary number. “Ones complement” computers change a number from positive to negative (or vice versa) by flipping all the bits. “Twos complement” machines flip the bits and add one. (For the sake of “Brevity” — see what I did there? — I’ll call them 1C and 2C computers.)

1C computers had the advantage of hardware simplicity (no separate hardware to do subtraction; just flip the bits and do addition) with a teeny edge in arithmetic performance which adds up (no pun intended). However, there was a complication. If you flipped all the bits in a register containing all zeros, you got all ones, meaning the computer distinguished between positive and negative zero!

For arithmetic purposes they were identical, but for logical operations they were as opposite as one and zero, yes and no, true and false. This led to many a bone-head error for a beginning programmer who mixed arithmetic and binary operations and didn’t keep the difference straight.

2C computers resolve the issue by the extra step — performed deep in the hardware below the view of a programmer — of adding a one after flipping the bits. It takes a microscopic amount of time longer, but it keeps things simple. Some computers with architectures rooted in the 1950s used 1C (I’m talking about you, Univac 1100s and decades of Sperry 1100 and Unisys 2200 descendants) , but by the 1970s, 2C had become the standard hardware design. (If you feel the urge to see the implications of all this, Wikipedia has a detailed article on Ones’ Complement [note the apostrophe].)

So does he have to go in reverse for Negative Zero?

Speed limits mean nothing to his type.

He could probably have gotten away with it if he had been walking backwards.

That danged rabbit gets me in trouble every time!

There’s no such thing as negative zero or positive zero. Zero is just zero.

Since speed limit signs don’t have decimals, I read it as negative 0.49mph

No hurry occifer, just trying to find my nest…hiccup

Franklin, the turtle , would put snail on his shell to help him get places faster and snail would say, "WHEEEEEE!

Poor turtle is really going to have to shell out big for that ticket. Also, I thought all snails worked for the USPS.

Very cute! The hat and light and little snail hands—LOL

Two snails were pretending to be race cars, but the audience had trouble telling them apart so one of them had a big S painted on his shell. He soon had a commanding lead, and the audience cried, “Wow! Look at that S car go!” – Source long forgotten

What did the snail riding on the back of a turtle say? WHEEEEEEEEEE!

The blinking red!!