The Science Joke Book

Joke 17: Cyber Craziness

There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Did you get the joke?

A hint, perhaps? 

This joke is based on counting in different number systems, specifically the binary system.

Binary uses the same rules as decimal, except you get only two digits: 0 and 1. 

Instead of being based on powers of ten, the binary number system is based on powers of two. Instead of a 10s place, a 100s place, a 1000s place, etc; you have a 2s place, a 4s place, an 8s place, a 16s place, and so on. The first counting number is written as 1, as in decimal.

But when you add 1 to that, you don't get 2. Instead, the numbers spill over into the twos place, and you get 10. Don't read that as "ten". It's "1 two and 0 ones" in binary. The next counting number is 11 (1 two and 1 one) = 3 (in decimal)l. Next comes 100, or "1 four, 0 twos, and 0 ones" = 4.

And computers count in binary systems, if you didn't already know that.

Now answer, why do computer scientists confuse Halloween and Christmas?

A: Because Oct 31 = Dec 25

(Well, you must be thinking like that. You detest computer science jokes and don't like them. Not one bit.

Let's see if we can change that.)

As you might have guessed, this was another joke about number systems.

This particular joke involves the decimal (base 10) number system and the octal (base 8) number system.

If you can figure out binary, octal is not too much of a stretch. The octal number system uses eight digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Each place in a number represents a power of eight. So you've got the 1s, 8s, 64s, 512s, and so on.

In the octal number system, the number 31 represents 3 eights and 1 one, or 25 in the decimal number system. Therefore, Dec 25 (or 25 in decimal) is the same as Oct 31 (31 in octal).

As musician Tom Lehrer quipped, octal "is just like base 10...if you're missing two fingers."

Why would a computer scientist need to know about octal?

Computers count in binary. 

But octal is used since the same number can be represented in octal using a third as many digits. Computer scientists who enter data in octal are therefore one-third as likely to make a mistake, and if a mistake does occur, there are one-third as many digits you have to search for the error.

Also, binary numbers convert easily to octal and vice versa.

Let's say you want to convert the binary number 10110101 into octal. Break the number into groups of three digits each, starting from the right, like this: 10 110 101. Then you would interpret each group into its equivalent one-digit value:

000 = 0

001 = 1

010 = 2

011 = 3

100 = 4

101 = 5

110 = 6

111 = 7

So 10110101 in binary translates into 265 in octal, or 2 sixty-fours, 6 eights, and 5 ones. In decimal, that's 181. Simple.

Like it? Then you should definitely check out these cyber acronyms, brought to you by CIA, or the Computer Industry Acronyms:

CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months

PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

ISDN: It Still Does Nothing

MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed

DOS: Defunct Operating System

WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System

OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too

PnP: Plug and Pray

APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity

IBM: I Blame Microsoft

MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers

COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language

MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs

WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If You're Really, Really Lucky And All Goes Well.

LOL.

(P.S. Can you guess how engineers play video games?

Like this:)