Monday, May 15, 2006

110001001011001000000001000000000 Kinds Of People

When I went up to the school library today to use one of the computers (from which you can probably get hold of far more books than you can from the shelves), the person using the machine next to me was using an Excel spreadsheet. There were only two columns to this spreadsheet. In the one on the left were good old-fashioned decimal integers, beloved of so many counting people. And to its right were the same numbers, only in binary. This is the column he was filling in, one by one, and at quite a rate. I don't know how high the numbers went, but by the time I got there, he was rapidly aproaching 500, and from the look of things he was nowhere near finished.

It seems to me that there's very likely an entirely sensible reason for this, but I cannot for the life of me think what it might be. It just goes to show how very odd our activities can seem out of context.

Or that he's a rather odd bloke.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

All I can think of is that he hacked into the library computers, and this was his cruel and ironic punishment.

Andrew said...

To me, it just goes to show that he doesn't know that Excel has a built in function to convert decimal numbers to binary ones.