• BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Are you indexing your fingers or counting them ?

    Indexing starts ar 0 but counting starts at 1.

    • Lodra@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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 🙂

      • radix@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        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 😁

        • obosob@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Lodra@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            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 🙂

          • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            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

  • RacoonVegetable@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • thor12022@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • BluesF@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      I can’t imagine a scenario when you need to be able to do BOTH positive and negative numbers at the same time 😂

  • Knusper@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    One time, I got hit with “You’re a programmer, you should be able to count.” and yep, made that exact joke…

      • Knusper@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago
    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 count
    
          • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            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.