I have a sign on my wall that says "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't." It's from a T-shirt that I saw on
ThinkGeek and have lusted after ever since...but that was last summer when I didn't even have the fifteen dollars to spend on it. So I did the cheap thing and made a sign that hangs over my bed.
My roommate Michele commented on it. "I think that 'ten kinds of people in the world' thing is really cool," she said. "Probably because I don't understand binary."
I started out by explaining to her that that number isn't ten. It's two. In binary. "One in binary is 1," I said. "Two is 10."
"What's three?" Michele asked. "100?"
"No, that's four," I said. "Three is 11."
"What?" she said. "You better explain this binary thing to me."
So I put down my book, got out of bed, and walked over to the whiteboard that's outside our door. It's for things like taking phone messages for each other, leaving messages for absent roommates, etc. I wrote at the top
16 8 4 2 1. I think I got to 32 before my brain got too overworked, and I didn't think I'd need anything bigger than that for any example I was going to give anyway. I showed Michele how to count in binary. "Okay, 'one,' easy. Put a 1 in the ones column. 'Two,' put a 1 in the twos column and a 0 in the ones. 'Three,' that's a two and a one." I went on. 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000. And Michele said, "Did I learn this in calc? I kinda remember this. I just didn't know it was called binary."
I smiled and said, "This is called binary." To reinforce the point, I wrote,
This is binary --> with the arrow pointing to my column of numbers, one through eight in binary. Michele was duly impressed with what she'd learned. She then asked another roommate "Erin, do you know what binary is?"
"It means two," Erin answered. "Like in music,
a, b." Leave it to Erin to make everything musical.
"So you just play
a, b, a, b over and over again?" Michele asked.
"Just
a, b," Erin said.
"Yeah,
a, b, a, b..."
"No, just
a, b."
(Me, I'm an English major. Only
as and
bs I know are the ones we use in scanning poetry. And then they're not worth being called
as or
bs until there's more than one of them, something to rhyme with them.)
Sometime later, Erin walked by the whiteboard and saw the binary stuff and said to Michele, "Is one-oh-one binary? Because there's ths musical form called 'rounded binary,' and it goes like that." She may have said some more after that, but I wasn't paying attention. I have no idea what she was talking about. I was still trying to go to bed (I shouldn't have been surprised that I failed, really; it's my fault for wanting to go to bed at eleven o'clock). Then I heard Michele say, "You should really get Holly to explain binary to you." Which Erin did. So I got up again and explained it again, and Erin said my "This is binary" arrow had been pointing at
101 (when it was clearly pointing between 101 and 110), which apparently is some musical thing. I still don't get that. So I drew a circle around all the numbers, the 1s and 0s and the
16 8 4 2 1 at the top, to make the arrow all-inclusive...which I thought it already had been anyway. Erin giggled at the silliness of it all.
I taught binary to two of my roommates, people whose subjects of study are conceivably much more math-related (music and science--yeah, it's biology, but still, science) than mine, which is English. Of course, a friend of mine once told me that I have this computer-science major "mentality"...as is probably evidenced by the fact that I like such things as ThinkGeek, I suppose...and let me tell you, if there's anything more geeky than being a computer geek, it's being thought a computer geek without actually being one.
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