2025-05-14

- How do people have a meme for every situation?
  
  One must have 10 memes (in base 10).
- I'll admit, this took a few seconds and a reread to process correctly. Well played
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OEF3JD-jYo
- You couldn't even write "base 4" when using base 3+1

So i kinda went on a thought rabbit hole here
I like jokes like this, in part because they only work in written form. Because if they were using base 10 they'd say "You're a ten", but base 2 would be "You're a one zero" (or one oh)
Wait, do people actually say "ten" when expressing two in binary? Do they actually say "one, ten, eleven, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and ten…"?
Have I been expressing binary incorrectly?
Am I overthinking this?
Honestly though, my favorite written pun is "Religions are more interested in profits than prophets"
Anyway, puns are fun. How do you say binary numbers?
- People don't usually change the name of the number when working in different basis so you would in fact just say "ten". If the actual representation was important you would say "one, zero, one, zero". I don't think people would say one thousand and ten as the word thousand is more about the actual number than the string "1000".
  You can use other round quantity when working on other basis, like a dozen or a gross in base twelve.
  
  Yeah but ten is the name for the concept of this many: iiiiiiiiii. Not for the symbols 1 and 0 in that order.
  So if I said "that's ten", I would be looking at "1010"
  If I were to send a "0010" over an interface as a test for example, I would say: "now I'm sending two. Are you recieving two?"
- Probably overthinking it (i hope). I usually say each binary digit individually, e.g. "one zero" for 10. Just makes more sense to me at least.
- You're not overthinking it at all and have hit upon an important point. The problem with "ten" is that it's too easily confused with 1010_2 or 0x0A_16. One-zero base 2 is unambiguous. Also one, ten, eleven etc would get very unwieldy very quickly, and as it already gets unwieldy very quickly even when just quoting digits, that's why we have hex and octal.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't.
- And those who don't know this joke is in ternary.
- there are two kinds of people, those who can extrapolate from incomplete data
  
  What's the other kind?
- There are 10 types of people in the world: those that understand n-ary, those that confuse it with (n-1)-ary, those that confuse it with (n-2)-ary, ..., those that confuse it with ternary, those that confuse it with binary, and those that don't understand it at all.

More like in base 1010 or base 10
- More like in base 10 or base 10
  
  Exactly! And don't forget about hexadecimal aka base 10
- Yeah, always bothered me that we don't refer to them by their highest digit. That would make them unambiguous.
  
  It's not like "base 0" was getting used anyways
  
  Then you would need an unique symbol for every possible number
- Yeah I doubt non-programmers would catch that.

Every number system is base 10.
Binary is base 1+1.
Ternary is base 2+1.
Octal is base 7+1.
Decimal is base 9+1.
Duodecimal is base B+1.
Hexadecimal is base F+1.
- I like this alot.
- Based.

Both work because the scale is 1-10. Binary just has fewer intermediate steps. Nobody is a binary 7.
- The joke is binary 10 is 2. Vs base 10 of 10
  
  I think they're saying that on a binary 1 to 10 scale, the range is only (decimal) 2, so a 10/10 for binary is a 2/2 in decimal (where you can only be a 1/2 or 2/2), which is still the highest value.
  
  Thanks for the explanation! I've only been doing digital logic since 1976 so I'm still a bit confused by it.
  
  That's clear. I thought this joke didn't quite work because of the same reason, too.