You want Nerdiness?

[maxcelcat]

You got nerdiness!

<nerdy>

The other day evildoom_bunny was asking be about what I do for a living. This was prompted by finding one of my old text books (Kernighan and Richie's classic The C Programming Language if you must know). The short answer is "I'm a computer programmer". The long answer is "I code in C++ in Visual Studio on a Windows platform making client server applications for..." well, you get the idea :-)

evildoom_bunny's next question was a perceptive one. Is programming like maths? Kinda, I said, one did grow from the other, and programming has a lot of formal rules like maths. This prompted me to try and explain hexadecimal and binary numbers.

Hex is base 16, so it goes 0,1,2,3...9,A,B,C,D,E,F,10 etc. evildoom_bunny didn't believe a word of it, ditto when I tried explained binary numbers... So when I wrote that:

F = 15 = 1111
and
10 = 16 = 10000
(In other words, F in Hex is equal to 15 in decimal and 1111 in binary, etc.) she utterly refused to believe me. Sara insisted that if F was equal to 1111, and E equal to 1110, then by rights:

G = 1.79 = slice of cheese.

And, by golly, in some number system, in some universe, she might just be right :-)

But, equally, I'll never understand a "trill table" in a million years....

</nerdy>

Comments

[evildoom-bunny.livejournal.com]

Bah.. I'm right in the Cheesecimal system. Haven't you ever heard of it?

[maxcelcat]

I have now. We'll have to write a scientific paper on it and submit it to all the best journals :-)