You have one apple. You divide it into quarters, so that you have 0.25 of an apple. Now divide it in half. So yes well technically you do have one half of 0.25 (and 0.5 is the answer that a calculator will return) what you actually have is 1/8 of an apple (0.125).

This is what pisses me off about Matt half the time. You end up with something that in the abstract makes sense because it's just numbers, but then if you try to make it make sense in real life it's stupid.

[–] shasta@lemm.ee 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Your confusion comes from the fact that dividing a quarter in half is 0.25/2. That's not what's shown in the comic. Dividing by 0.5 is the same as multiplying by 2. It's just a quirk of syntax, the way we write math. If you spelled it out using English the comic would say "multiplying a quarter by two equals a half". The confusion just stems from someone's unfamiliarity with mathematical notation.

[–] billgamesh@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 months ago

exactly. failure of english, not math. Math allows fairly accurate descriptions of the universe, humans (and especially languages) evolved to adequately percieve the narrow band of qualia that have been relevant to survival

[–] UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Fractions are just funky when dividing. Dividing by 0.5 is the same multiplying by 2.

Your analogy is really close, but backwards is all. If you have a quarter of an apple. In order to get half a whole apple, you need another quarter. Two quarters make a half, so dividing a quarter by 0.5 gives you 2 quarters. Dividing a quarter by 2 gives you 0.5 of the original quarter which is your 1/8th