this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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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.
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