Are you indexing your fingers or counting them ?
Indexing starts ar 0 but counting starts at 1.
Ffs. 16, 8, 4, 2, 1.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. My son is a year and half old. I’ve been teaching to count on his hand in binary since day 0. He goes wild and celebrates when we reach 31 🙂
My siblings and I always loved the number 4 because our puritanical mother was so casual about sticking her middle finger out at only that moment. That was just about the most taboo thing we could imagine, and it was as a result hilarious.
I’m in my mid 40s, and I’ve never thought to count in binary on my fingers. I haven’t needed to use binary for about 30 years, and I’m easily the geekiest of my friends, so I’ve never had an excuse to do it for fun.
You’ve just put a huge smile on my face.
Guess what I’m teaching my kid this week 😁
Most of the time it’s not exactly useful and some of the positions are awkward (e.g. 8, 9, 10), counting to 31 on one hand is maybe useful.
More useful IMO is counting in base 6 and treating each hand as a single digit. i.e counting to 35 on 2 hands without awkward fingerings. Better than 10, less awkward than binary.
It does take s little practice but not too much. The awkward positions are easy enough after a few weeks.
I chose binary for two reasons. First, it is occasionally useful to count that high on one hand. Second, the education when he’s older. I hope this will give him a note intuitive understanding of different bases. And binary is specifically useful for understanding comported and software development. I dont intend to push him toward a career in software but I think there’s a fair chance he chooses that anyways.
Plus we’ve made it into something fun 🙂
We’re about to start learning how to program, probably with Python, so it could be a good way to start thinking about how computers work. I never would have thought to try other systems though, so I’ll look into base 6. Thanks for the suggestion :)
without awkward fingerings
Oh, the fun I would have had with that phrasing if we weren’t talking about teaching kids… :D
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Jokes on you, I use my fingers as bits for a total of 1024 numbers (0-1023). Or I can sacrifice 1 finger time be a sign bit and count negative numbers too.
Jokes on you, fingers are tri-state (fully extended, fully closed, bent at middle knuckle) not binary, so I can count to 59049.
Someone with better finger control should be able to treat them as quad-state, granting the ability to count to 1048576 by bending just the outer knuckle.
Let’s just keep multi level cells to just flash memory.
3^10-1=59048.
I like this idea in theory, but some combinations of fingers are very awkward to extend without the others, and one particular combination is very rude.
Maybe that’s just because 132 is a rude number.
I can’t imagine a scenario when you need to be able to do BOTH positive and negative numbers at the same time 😂
If we figure out a clever trick with phalanges we can go even further
Count in binary up to 1023 on your hands you filthy casual
just beware when counting the number 4 in public
Or 256, or 260.
Especially 260.
You count one finger up as the same as no fingers up? Counting is not the same as an index.
One time, I got hit with “You’re a programmer, you should be able to count.” and yep, made that exact joke…
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Band practice. We were playing some rapid song with changing time signatures, so everyone was struggling to count along. I just commented on it, so got some flak, but only as a joke.
def count_fingers(hand: list): count = len(hand) if count != 5: if count < 5: raise Exception("Check if fingers missing, or just smart ass") else: raise Exception("Oh... oh no.") return countYou can do
if (count := len(hand)) != 5: # do something with "count"Btw, looks much nicer
I’ll use ternary operators when you force them into my cold, dead hands
It’s not the ternary operator, it is the walrus operator introduced in Python 3.8 if I’m correct
You are correct. I came back to say that I’ll use the walrus operator when it’s pushed into my cold, dead hands, but… I might actually use it, now that I’ve refreshed myself on it.
If you count your knuckles you can get all the way up to b on one hand! Both hands can get up to 17!
Up to 355687428096000? That’s impressive!
Lua crew represent
