Skip to main content
Home Forums 68kMLA OS X HD Partitioning — #13
Post #13 by equill
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryTroubleshooting
Post DateMon, 10 Nov 2008 - 22:53
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/os-x-hd-partitioning.15515/
Post
If I place two oranges on the table, I can take one away and see the one remaining. I can take the other one away and thus see zero oranges. It is a relative difference -- zero versus "something" -- but one that is appreciated by most (all?) animals.
No. That is altogether-human metonymy, and vernacular use of a highly-specific concept out of context. If there is none (=not one) or nothing present, you see none or nothing, not zero. The antonym of 'something' is 'nothing'. The very word zero (=emptiness) embraces that. Zero is the point from which algebraic mensuration begins, and as a point has no dimensions, including quantity. Arabic notation emphasizes that in its use of a '.' rather than a '0'.

The principal reason for its slipping into common parlance is much the same as the perversion of the mathematical operator 'plus' to serve in place of the specific 'also' or 'in addition'. It is on a par with the ceaseless churning of the advertising and bigbiz world's quest to justify its existence with feeble grandiloquence: deliverables, issues, stakeholders, transitioning, across, yecch ... Oh! How with it we are.

We have become inured to the inherent nonsense of using 'zero' as if it were a quantity because programmers wished to avoid the effort of translating the minimal value of a digital array into rational notation. That doesn't mean that we should lose sight of the reality that zero is an artifice, a concept. When you believe that you have four digits (0-4) on each hand rather than five (1-5), your example may begin to hold water, if not sense.

de

mp.ls