x * y = x / ( 1/y )
The problem is just that its missing the units. The mass is divided, and the number of cells goes up, but the total mass of both cells stays about the same at the time of division(or maybe some of it is converted to energy that is lost from the cells to thier environment, so probably goes down), and is split between each cell.
It’s Feynmann’s multiplication technique. What you do is make a slightly more complicated multiplication, then divide everything by infinity so it all goes to zero, then pull out of a hat a magician pulling himself out of a hat.
They divide by 0.5.
1÷0.5 = 2.
Nope! Chuck Testa.
All the people trying to explain why division and multiplication are the same and dividing by fractions bla bla bla…
But it’s missing the point that a cell dividing is nothing like algebraic division so the analogy just doesn’t make sense.
Saying its “dividing in half” so its actually “x/0.5 = 2x” doesn’t make any sense because the phrase “divide in half” in every other context means “x/2”…
Any ways if you want to model a cell dividing you should use an exponential
I mean, a × b = a ÷ (1 ÷ b), so that’s not so ridiculous. Just a bit hacky.
They multiply in two by dividing in half (2x=x/0.5 as 0.5=¹/₂ which is the inverse of two)
Always bothered me that this feels unintuitive in maths, even though this is precisely what maths tries to model with division.
But yeah, being able to divide by fractions of 1 and negative numbers and whatnot, that really does not make it feel like you’re cutting cake.
If you divide two cakes by half a cake you get four half cakes.
And negative cakes just make you more hungry.
Yeah, I guess, lots of maths being done without units is the culprit here.
2 / 0.5 = 4just makes it sound like you’ve magically applied some transformation to2, which has cloned it.
2 cakes / 0.5 cakes = 4 half-cakesrather makes it clear why it’s suddenly double the amount, without cloning involved.
Just look at it as a mass calculation. Original mass is X and after dividing its X/2 so you have two halves. Simple as that :)
Mathematicians: they don’t think biology be like that, but it do
Biology is just when molecules try too hard.
It’s an ongoing chemical reaction started billions of years ago.
All of human works included.
No good nucleic acids making everyone else look bad. Seriously who TF thinks it’s healthy to work for a billion years straight? 🙄
“Given enough time, hydrogen will begin to wonder where it came from.”
X/0.5 easy
Dont be too hard on them. They are convinced that buying 12 2/4 melons in a train that started in new York at 8:15 going west and dividing 45 apples in another train that started at 10:45 in San Francisco going North are completely normal activities.
As long as you show your work
I feel attacked.
Just wait until they learn that computers subtract by adding, and multiply by adding, and divide by adding, and do exponents by adding, and do logarithms by adding.
Wait…is it All…just adding? ಠ_ಠ
Always has been
it multiplies by using a complex set of gate arrays that do some adding, otherwise hardware multipliers are like multiplier tables built up by logic gates. Early CPUs did multiplication by adding (essentially multiplications are just recursively adding the same numbers to themselves), and if you were lucky it was optimized to use bit-shifts.
Division is a lot more complicated though. I did some optimization by multiplying with reciprocals instead, but speed gain was negligible due to memory bandwith limitations.
There must be add-vantages to this design.
