“This is a sphere getting exponentially angrier as time passes.”

When you learn computer science, at some point you encounter floating-point numbers in all their peculiar glory. Floating-point numbers allow you to store values that are extremely huge or extremely tiny, but that comes with a strange price. The number is still just a number with a regular limited precision, but is accompanied by a floating point – another number that just says how many zeroes to put after or in front. In effect, when your number is millions, you get a precision of thousands. When your number if billions, you can only count in millions, and so on. This makes intuitive sense, in a same way a billionaire doesn’t care about pocket change. (Go to a floating point visualizer, and you will see you can input 9000004 and 9000005 and 9000006 with no problem, but add one more zero and 90000004 will be rounded down to 90000000, and 90000005 up to 90000008. Bigger numbers get even less precise.) This has a strange effect when it comes to videogames or graphic software: The…