A photo of a cake with 8 candles in a row. The first and fifth candle from the right are lit. The caption reads “Happy 17th Birthday”

  • raman_klogius@ani.socialEnglish
    22·
    2 days ago

    Maybe this is a signed cake, so one can celebrate negative birthdays of people who aren’t born yet. 🤔

    • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
      7·
      2 days ago

      Light all the candles as an announcement that you’re gonna start having kids and hope she’ll get pregnant in exactly three months. Not in 2, not in 4, but in 3 precisely.

        • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
          2·
          18 hours ago

          Longer explanation:

          Because most computers use two’s complement to make negative numbers. To produce -x, you take x, flip all the bits, and then add 1. Conveniently, this process works both ways, so if you have an int with a positive MSB, i.e. 1*******, that’s a negative number, and if you invert and add 1, you get the positive number.

          So if you take 11111111, and apply this process, you get 00000001, which equals 1. Thus, 11111111 = -1

          Secondly, the gestation period of humans is 9 months, and there are 12 months in a year.

          So if you have binary candles and all of them lit, that can suggest, which it does in my previous comment, that you’re celebrating a child’s -1st birthday.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
            2·
            23 hours ago

            Ahh, because of the 9 month gestation. 9+3=12

            I thought this was about some kind of obscure subnormal float convention or something.