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Comment by sephoric | Hacker News Reader

My son and I have been trying to understand floating point numbers with almost no success, since it's usually explained with arcane mathematical symbols that neither of us understand. This page is brilliant and I'm going to show this to him, after editing the hilarious image with the owl. Why is profanity necessary to convey intensity? It's 2019, surely we have better ways of doing so by now.

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> Why is profanity necessary to convey intensity?

It's not necessary, it's just funny. The owl picture is a meme borrowed from the internet to make the same point you did ... that it feels like math notation skips over the how.

FWIW, spending time in a floating point calculator can be very enlightening. I use this page all the time https://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html

A great exercise to try with your son: try numbers of various magnitudes and see what a 1-bit change does to the decimal value. For example, try the earth's radius in meters and determine the FP32 precision in meters at the surface of the earth.

Serious question - why get so bothered by it? If he's old enough to be thinking about floating point numbers, he's definitely heard the word, and it's not especially gratuitous in this instance. Might be a good opportunity to discuss how word choice is dependent on context.

> Serious question - why get so bothered by it?

Same reason why many people refuse to visit nude beaches despite others not seeing any issue in said these beaches: personal values and principles.

The owl photo has been going around the internet for at least 15 years now.

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