So here's my Friden STW10, and
today I wanted to respond to one of the most frequent comments I get,
which Is:
"Try to divide by 0, is awesome and dangerous,"
"if divide by zero does it catch fire?,"
"try to divide by zero," "please make a division by zero," and then I asked the guy to try it by himself and he said "I
only do it on my piano," which actually wouldn't help.
A gain, I was kind of reluctant to do it, and I had to think for a while what would
happen if I did it, and I convinced myself that
no, it wouldn't catch fire, although it would be a very popular
YouTube video. So let's try it. Let's divide by zero, and see what happens.
So let me clear everything and
enter 3 5 5 as the dividend.
Okay, so we have a 355 out there.
There you go, 355
right here. And now
we are going to divide by zero, so I'll do a keyboard clear. Plunk! There's nothing on the keyboard, and
I'll hit the two buttons, and we'll see what happens. For that I will reset it - oh, other direction.
Reset it here, because it's more spectacular.
Okay, off we go. So it's a Friden, you need to press two buttons to divide. The right one, and the left one.
And what happens is that it gets into an infinite loop and
it will never stop, and I guess it heats up so evntually, it would catch fire.
But guess what, they thought about it! There's a button here, it's called DIV STOP.
And I guess that was made specially for idiots making YouTube videos. They had lots of foresight.
So this is what it does: it just
gets it in an infinite loop.
But let's understand why that is.
Let's clear everything, and do a regular division
my favorite one, which gives pi: 3 5 5
enter dividend
divided by 1 1 3
and again I'll try to do it from the
edge here. So what happens, is that in order to do divisions,
what it actually does is successive subtractions, and it does it as
we do it in school: it's trial and error. So it will try to subtract
what I just entered, which is 1 1 3, from this number,
and trying progressively, this times 10, times 100, times 1000, until it hits over here.
And finally it's subtracts enough of a chunk that it overflows, and
it tells it, it has subtracted too much, and then it starts to move it
one to the left and subtracts a smaller amount, and that's how it does a division eventually. So let's see how that works.
You see it moves, moves, moves
Ding! It overflows
and eventually it divided, and it's the
3.141592 something - it's the approximation of pi.
So what happens is that when you divide by zero,
it just subtracts nothing and
so it can never overflow, and it gets stuck in an infinite loop.
So here you go, here you have it: divide by zero on a
Friden STW10. Let's do it again
Carriage clear.
Enter
some kind of stupid number,
enter dividend
on to the right, clear the keyboard, divide by zero,
and watch the smoke!
Okay, it will do that forever. Good night!
A brilliant cast. Jack Lemmon in a delightful role which gives full reign to Jack's amazing versatility.