Recently I wanted to refer to the general populace of the divisions by zero, but it occurred to me we don’t have a good shorthand for it,. I.e. like one talks about “lemmings” or “redditors”. We could use something for members of lemmy.dbzer0.com.

Ideas?

  • CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    A division by zero is incalculable. On computers, this is sometimes represented by a special value NaN, which stands for “Not a number”.

    So we could be NaNs? Although a few Anglo countries use Nan to refer to a grandmother.

    Another benefit: NaN implies a kind of freedom. To quote from the cult 60’s show The Prisoner: “I am not a number, I am a free man”

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      … I proposed this as well, and another thing NaN is quite close to is… Naan bread, lol.

      Basically a kind of flatbread, usually associated with India, sort of kind of like pita bread.

      Its pronounced like… Non, at least the way I pronounce Non, as a PNW dialect English native speaker, not like Nan, as in Nanna, or other similar words to refer to a grandmother, or sometimes mother, different vowel sound.