For a lot of people in America, a car is a facet of everyday life. It’s generally not something a lot of people spend their time thinking about in more abstract concepts. Sure, one might think about that annoying squeak or if they have to get gas, but not much more. However, I live in San Francisco and don’t own a car, nor have I for many years. For me, driving a car is something of a rarity and when I do, it’s often rented via zipcar. So each time I’m in a vehicle, I spend more time analyzing the vehicle itself. Today’s thought was a simple one, borne out of basic necessity: why are there cup holders, but not cellphone holders?

As the title states, the caret (^) is not used as an exponent in MySQL. I’m not certain what exactly it does (and couldn’t find any documentation after a quick search), and would love to find out what its purpose is. I ran into this problem today when I noticed that MySQL’s math results (using ^) didn’t match my own. After triple checking my own math, I added lots of parens and still got nowhere, so I checked the Operator Precedence and sure enough it listed the caret (^) as falling between “*, /, DIV, %, MOD” and “- (unary minus), ~ (unary bit inversion)".