Binary, Hexadecimal And The Fascism Of The Decimal System
We have ten fingers and ten toes (or, most of us do. Exceptions include the noted alpinist Reinhold Messner, who has only three toes and seven fingers. Luckily, this leaves him with ten total digits and thus Messner presumably has little inherent, morphological difficulties with the decimal system). Because of our built-in base-10 bias and the fascism of our system of mathematics education, we humans have come to view the decimal system as the only logical way to count. We count to nine and then as we raise our second thumb, we stick a placeholder in the next column to the left. But computers don’t conform to the evolution of human bone structure. They can only count to two. (Technically, they can only count to one, starting at zero.) This is binary. read more