APL\360

Boris Gimbarzevsky boris at summitclinic.com
Thu Feb 11 19:01:21 CST 2021


Counting in binary on ones fingers was something I first ran into at 
age 11 when found a book on Military Electronics in a surplus 
store.  Everything simplified, but in computer section found binary 
system explained with using fingers to represent bits.  That was 
something that I used immediately as used to count steps to various 
places but after 1000+ steps would often forget where I was so would 
increment my binary digital counter every 100 steps.  At that age 1 
mile was probably about 2500 steps so I my counter would have 
overflowed at about 40.9 miles.  Also LSB was my left small finger 
which seems weird now but suspect that's what illustration in book 
showed of how to count in binary on your fingers.  Found manual 
method easier to use than a pedometer.

>I too count sheep with my fingers, but I never get past zero due to the
>lack of sheep.    :-)
>
>Tom Hunter
>
>On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 5:34 PM Tor Arntsen via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 30 Jan 2021 at 03:27, dwight via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> > wrote:
> > > If we'd thought about it we could count to 1023 on our fingers.
> > > Dwight
> >
> > Some sheep herders in (IIRC) the Caucasus do, or did at least. I
> > learned about that some decades ago. Counting sheep on their fingers.
> > I use the system sometimes.
> >
> > -Tor
> >




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