Light On Dark Water

Dot Day

"dot" = "period" = binary 00101110 in ASCII, or 10/11/10.

So, Happy Dot Day, or:
01001000011000010111000001110000
01111001001000000100010001101111
01110100001000000100010001100001
0111100100100001

This is so exciting. We'll have some more binary days in November.

(Yes, those ones and zeroes do say "Happy Dot Day" in the text coding format used by your computer, but no, I didn't work it out by hand: I used this cool converter.)

My father quoted an early computer expert whom he encountered in his engineering work as saying "A computer consists of a million idiots, each of whom can count to 1." Nowadays it's many many millions, but remember, when your computer is misbehaving: they're still idiots.

Really, the fundamental concept is so brilliant: a number system in which the only digits are 1 and 0, which can be represented electrically by "on" and "off". And everything–the whole Internet, and lots of other stuff–is built on that. Mankind is wonderfully ingenious.

Maclin Horton

16 responses to “Dot Day”

  1. Janet

    Why do I love stuff like this?
    My daughter joined a FB “event” for pi day which will be 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. Mac

    I have no idea, other than “it’s neat,” but I sense that your devotion is much deeper than mine.

    Reply
  3. Janet

    0100000101101100011011000010000001111001011011110111010101110010001000000110001001100001011100110110010100100000011000010111001001100101001000000110001001100101011011000110111101101110011001110010000001110100011011110010000001110101011100110010111000100000010110010110111101110101001000000110100001100001011101100110010100100000011011100110111100100000011000110110100001100001011011100110001101100101001000000111010001101111001000000111001101110101011100100111011001101001011101100110010100100000011011010110000101101011011001010010000001111001011011110111010101110010001000000111010001101001011011010110010100101110

    Reply
  4. Janet

    hmmm

    Reply
  5. Mac

    Ain’t skeered.
    Janet’s message, translated (I can see the whole thing in my TypePad control panel):
    “All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.”

    Reply
  6. Jesse Canterbury

    At risk of being a stick-in-the-mud, I feel I should point out that the actual date is 10/11/2010. This whole discussion would’ve made much more sense a thousand years ago. Well, sort of.

    Reply
  7. Mac

    Yeah, yeah…:-) but people do conventionally write dates that way (without the century). Perhaps there’s a Y2.1K problem in the making.

    Reply
  8. Janet Cupo

    Well, actually Maclin and I DID have this conversation 1000 years ago, but none of the rest of y’all are old enough to remember.
    AMDG

    Reply
  9. Louise

    I really can never get my head around binary code.

    Reply
  10. Mac

    Yeah, those were the days. We had to write out all the 1s and 0s by hand so conversation was slower.

    Reply
  11. Mac

    Louise, I was about to say it’s basically simple, which it is, and started to explain it, and then realized it was going to be a couple of paragraphs and it’s time for me to go home…

    Reply
  12. Mac

    Our ordinary number system is based on tens. We have ten digits, 0-9. We have no digit for 10 or 11 or 12… To express a number greater than 9, we use places. So a second digit to the left of a single digit is not the number of units or ones but the number of tens. E.g., 10 = one ten = 1×10+0. 11 = one ten plus one = 1×10+1. etc.
    Binary is just number system based on twos. We only have two digits, 0 and 1. We have no digit for two. To express a number greater than 1, we use places. So a second digit to the left of a single digit is not the number of units or ones but the number of twos. E.g., 10 = one two–1×2+0. 11 = one two and one one–1×2+1 = three.
    I thought that was so cool when I first learned about it.

    Reply
  13. Mac

    Hence the t-shirt: “There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don’t.”

    Reply
  14. Louise

    Yeah, I can grasp binary code (when I’m reacquainted with it) but I just can’t get my head around the fact that binary code is the basis of the internet. Mind you, I don’t understand how computers work – physically, I mean.

    Reply
  15. Mac

    Imagine a long string of 1s and 0s (bits). Divide them into groups of 8 (bytes). Decree that each possible combination of 8 1s and 0s (there are 256) represents a letter of the alphabet (different codes for upper and lower), a numerical digit, or a punctuation mark. That basic concept defines all text. Other similar constructs group the bits in other ways for other purposes, for instance instructions that tell the computer things like “look at this-many bytes from this location and arrange the same number of bits in the same order at that location.” Everything is built out of primitive operations like that.
    Which probably doesn’t help much…

    Reply
  16. Louise

    It helps a bit. 🙂

    Reply

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