So tonight I'm swimming in the pool at the health club and I come to the 10x50 kick part of the program (Act 2, Scene 2, added during a quick rewrite before the curtain went up after reading Ande's Swim Faster Faster tip about kicking earlier today). Anyway, I have trouble counting when exhausted (which I will certainly be after even a short kick set), so what's a poor programmer nerd to do? I know! I'll use my zoomers and a couple kickboards to count to 10 on the pool deck in binary! Pointing up is a "1" bit. Pointing sideways is a "0" bit.
(I've done this before when stuck running on short indoors tracks, but there I've been able to count on my fingers without ruining my streamline.)
Am I weird or what?
Skip Montanaro
Huh? :bump:
For us math idiots out here, what the heck is a binary?
As Mel said, in binary something is "either on or off." In other words binary only uses the digits 0 or 1. You might think "why the heck would you want to do that?" Well, at the lowest level, this is how computers function. A circuit can either be on or off. We wouldn't have computers as we know them today if not for the binary system.
If you've heard of a bit in computer parlance this represents a single binary digit (a one or zero). Computers will group these together into bytes and this is how all data is stored on a computer.
Yes, everything you write on these forums is really just a bunch of zeros and ones :)
Huh? :bump:
For us math idiots out here, what the heck is a binary?
As Mel said, in binary something is "either on or off." In other words binary only uses the digits 0 or 1. You might think "why the heck would you want to do that?" Well, at the lowest level, this is how computers function. A circuit can either be on or off. We wouldn't have computers as we know them today if not for the binary system.
If you've heard of a bit in computer parlance this represents a single binary digit (a one or zero). Computers will group these together into bytes and this is how all data is stored on a computer.
Yes, everything you write on these forums is really just a bunch of zeros and ones :)
