9 Mar
2007
9 Mar
'07
7:31 a.m.
On Friday 09 March 2007 02:05, Erik Baigar wrote:
Hi Lyle,
thank you very much for your email.
--snip--
P.S. > "Black holes are where God is dividing
by zero"
How do you explain the different sizes of black holes?
Division by zero produces a NaN (Not a Number) - and IEEE 754 NaNs are
represented with the exponential field filled with ones and some non-zero
number in the mantissa.
A bit-wise example of a IEEE floating-point standard single precision NaN:
x11111111axxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. x = undefined. Therefore, since x is
undefined, there are many possible valid results - and therefore varying
sizes of black holes ;-)
Cheers,
Lyle
--
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"