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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/postcard/?comic=1018
Reassembled from partial quotes in archived forum messages by: Drachefly
The author writes:
For those of you wondering what Vanessa's insight was, here's a parallel example for those of you not familiar with automobiles: the non-standard base 5 with the digits B, A, 0, 1, and 2 such that A + 1 = 0, B + 2 = 0, 10A is (in standard base 10, ) 24, while A01 is (in standard base 10, ) -24.
You can eliminate the usage of the minus sign as a prefix on explicit numbers without losing the ability to express any number... but if you banish it from mathematics altogether, you'll have to use constructions like "x + A×y" where we'd normally say "x - y".