Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for June 02, 2013

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A

Big deal, not much difference

Surak-The Father of the Vulcan Way of Life.

@TSRJanBic got it right. She did say she counted to TEN in hexadecimal, not 15.

Counting to 10 in Hex…123456789ABCDEF10

I haven’t thought of hexadecimal in a long time. Base 7 wasn’t quite as fun:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 101 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

I’m told that when General Electric was in the computer business they redefined hex to count 1 2 … 9 A B C D E G. Then they filled memory with bytes with value 254 so the dumps of unused memory looked like GE GE GE ….

Never did that.

In my Kindergarten days, grandpa taught me to count to 100 in Latin (I counted squares of sidewalks walking to school before running into some pals).

10 would be the 17th number in base 16. Binary would have been fun….

You’re all forgetting that the first digit of any number system is zero. So in hex the counting goes: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F. Sixteen symbols, 0 through F. So the number 20 base 10 is equal to 14 base 16. Simple. Easy peasy.

My brain hurts reading all these ‘numbers’. It’s Sunday, after all. …And I have no idea who Surak is, at the moment. The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I do not require myself to dig deep into the recesses of my mind on my one day off.

Sorry you had to hear that Jay.

…. making me think on a Sunday morning. humph! Here I thought Hex had to do with putting a spell on someone. …. or something. :)

Well, at least she didn’t count it like this.00110001001100100011001100110100001101010011011000110111001110000011100100111010

Of course, if she had done that, Roy would have re-thought marrying Kathy.

@TSR… Thanks. I was stuck on Sarek. I couldn’t place Surak.

I suppose the controversy could have been avoided by writing ‘10’ instead of ‘ten.’ But I don’t suppose the authors will use a base number gag again for a long, long time now.

If we’re going to call 10 ‘ten’ no matter the base, or by extension 100 = ‘one hundred’, that makes for a great cheat in hide-and-seek.

“But I did count to 100:11011100”

Binary of course.

Don’t be so down on geeks, ladies. They’d appreciate the company of pretty women like yourselves more than any ‘normal’ guy. [I put the word ‘normal’ in quotes because EVERYBODY is a geek about something or other.]

codedaddy Badge-pro commented on Pearls Before Swine 8 days ago

So for the dog, I see that Bill provides the woof over his head.

Hmmm…

Scott, to answer your question as speak the “Numbers” in Hexadecimal …. What I learned (in Engineering school, back when I had hair) is that the numbers are spoken as the single symbol name indicates …. “0 to 9” – pronounced just like the base 10 numbers every one knows … “A to F” – pronounced like the English alphabet letters … so pronouncing “10” in hex sounds like “one-zero” (not “Ten”)… in binary “10” is also spoken “one-zero” … “77” in hex is “Seven-Seven”, not seventy-seven…. No Engineer I know pronounces hex, binary, or an octal “10” as “ten” unless they are trying to pull a math prank on someone… we do this to differentiate between base 10 and base 16 when talking (when writing, in most cases, we add “zero x” as a prefix to designate the number is hex – i.e. 0×10)

What sanjosetest said. I’ve been in the computer field since the 1970s, and no one ever says “ten” when referring to a hexadecimal number. It’s “A” if you’re talking about the decimal value 10, and “one-zero” if you mean the hex value 10. The word “ten” implies that you mean the decimal value, which converts to A in hex.

‘Course, that’s just programmers. Non-programmers call hex 10 “ten” all the time, resulting in conversations like this one. And Carolina can call it anything she wants.