Forum:Doctor Ø - what the hell?

Am I the only one who find the way that the Courier tells dr. 0 how to seperate the number "0" from the letter "O" to be completely wrong, especially with an INT check of 9.

The guy doesn't want his name confused with the letter "O", well, fair deal. So instead of confusing it with one letter, another one, "Ø" (which is a letter in Danish, Faroese and Norwegean), is chosen. That kinda makes the choice of symbol lose sense by itself, since it's just another letter.

And from a mathematical standpoint, it doesn't make sense either. Ø is the symbol for an empty set, that is: A set with no elements. A set with no elements is not a damn zero, it's a set with no elements (ok, I'll give you this much, the amount of elements in the set is, well, 0).

I know the explaination the courier gives is some shit about a code, but that doesn't make it more correct.

And a different solution, more simple, more correct, would have been to just fucking spell the word "zero", putting a dot in the middle or using some relatively simple math, such as "sin(pi)" (or anything else that equals 0. No the only one that isn't a zero is chosen. I know, it's a small complaint in an otherwise great DLC, but doing that quest still makes me cringe. 85.82.249.149 00:54, August 15, 2011 (UTC)Dane with interest in math who isn't botered to log in

A long time ago, before everyone used to carry a keyboard around with them, people used to have a skill to crudely imitate written text with items like pens and pencils in a freehand fashion. Unfortunately few people were talented enough to do a very good job of imitating written text with this proto-keyboarding technique. An English language convention grew in cases where the letter oh and the digit zero needed to be distinguished from each other (say in a variable name or serial number) of putting a slash through the the digit zero when freehand proto-keyboarding. It is a historical fact and can be seen in ancient documents from the 1980s or earlier, although actually reading this crude proto-keyboarding can be difficult. Another interesting artifact of this crude proto-keyboarding was placing a horizontal line through the middle of the letter zee/zed to distinguish it from the digit two. In the Fallout alternative reality small computerized devices and the attendant keyboards were not in general use and apparently the Fallout universe retained this primitive proto-keyboarding technique (notice the number of pencils to be found all over) and the slash through the zero to distinguish it from oh convention. Kudos to the Fallout design team for being aware of this historical oddity.75.67.224.12 03:10, August 15, 2011 (UTC)

I have nothing to add to this but I just had to say that "It is a historical fact and can be seen in ancient documents from the 1980s or earlier, although actually reading this crude proto-keyboarding can be difficult." is one of the best things I've read all day. I was LOLing!! -becks77

O with a slash is a valid represtantation of "Zero". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero Agent c 00:57, August 17, 2011 (UTC)

Being Active Duty Army, I know that U.S. Army still chooses to put a 'slash' through their zeros in most hand-written paperwork to signify the difference between the letter 'O' and zero '0'. We use this in our Unit ID code, which is WABJAØ. GlassJAw667 01:08, August 17, 2011 (UTC)