If true, that is without doubt a rare event in the life of Ed Markey.
If true, that is without doubt a rare event in the life of Ed Markey.Saw the clip. The man has a point...
Well, I did qualify that by noting that I couldn’t tell from that short clip what point he was actually trying to make - only that arithmetic is, contrary to the reactions I was seeing here (your #10 not least), very far from being the entirety of mathematics.A friend of mine once e-mailed me to say that he was teaching computer use, and wanted help with nomenclature. He understood what analog-to-digital conversion was - but he was unable to research why it was called “analog” anything. And that set me to thinking about the difference between quantity and number. Number is a name for a quantity.You could have two glasses with some water in each, for example. If I asked you to add the quantities of water, you could use a measuring cup and say, “One of the glasses has 5 ounces of water and the other has 6 ounces of water; the result of that addition is 11 ounces of water.” That would be performing conversions to digital numbers, followed by arithmetic addition. But there is another approach, which a preschool child might do - and which would be equally, or even more, valid. He might simply pour the water from each glass into a pan. That is the requested quantity. “Eleven ounces” is merely a more or less inaccurate name for that quantity.
Which makes the point that the procedure which you were taught in grade school is indeed “addition,” but addition is not defined by that procedure. That procedure is merely a way to determine the name for the sum of two quantities from the names for those two quantities (the generic term “analog” in the term “analog to digital” derives from the “analog computer” - which synthesizes voltages which are analogous to physical quantities which would be expected to occur in a system under interesting conditions).