Sunday, October 10, 2010

Happy 10 - 10 - 10!

Everyone knows the answer to the ultimate question of life, universe & everything is 42.

10 10 10 in binary = 42. For geeks worldwide that makes today, 10-10-10, #42day. Which then, by further extension, makes it an awesome day to celebrate The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

So fellow hikers, let us commence the celebration!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

FAIL.

Binary numbers only have digits that are 0 or 1. 42 doesn't even make sense in binary.

Anonymous said...

The GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programming, contains a function—memfrob()—which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.

So you could say that 101010 = 42.

Allie Wojtaszek said...

I'm not an expert by any means in binary coding (glad to see though that I'm not the only one, Anon #1 seems to also be lacking in this knowledge). But I figured I might as well go learn more about it this morning.

Thanks to the article "Extremal binary self-dual codes of lengths 42" in the Kyushu journal of mathematics I now know that entering binary has a lot more to do with it than only the digits 1 and 0 and that binary numbers do indeed convert to decimal numbers and that 101010 is actually 42.

Whew. That's knowledge I'm glad to have! I'm also very glad that smarter people than me work with binary coding! :)

On the Exploring Binary Website they have a great list of binary dates coming up for 2010 and 2011, with the conversions to their decimals equivalents already done.

Check it out here:

http://www.exploringbinary.com/binary-dates-in-2010-and-2011/

Interestingly enough, from what I can tell, these kinds of binary dates won't occur again until the years 3000 and 3001 (and then again in 3010 and 3011). Might as well enjoy them while you can!

Allie Wojtaszek said...

Even more links for you! If you get over the fact that this is math (not always my fav subject) this is actually quite fun! And I now know how to how to count to 1,023 on my fingers in binary.

I also learned that 01000111 01100101 01100101 01101011 01100100 01100001 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100010 01101100 01101111 01100111 00100000 01101111 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 01101110 01100101 01110100 01110011 can convert to "Geekdad is the best blog on the internets."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/10/1010-fun-things-to-do-on-101010/#ixzz124bNXNQr