There's no such thing as two.
I've taught myself to count in binary on my fingers. It only took a bit of initial explanation from Scott, who figured it out himself while bored during a law school lecture. It's fairly simple, so it's no big accomplishment, but it' kind of cool to be able to count to 1,023 with your hands.
For an encore I'm attempting addition, which involves breaking it all down into binary parts (17+19=16+1+16+2+1). Subtraction's harder because when it comes to performing ordered tasks in my head, I don't work backwards as well as I do forwards.
Scott wonders if this might not be a better way to teach math to children, if not pragmatically--in a mostly decimal world, a binary child would be at a disadvantage initially--then at least theoretically; it might have the potential to help those who don't do well in arithmetic. It makes sense to me, who as a former English major has just as much authority on the matter as a law student. You can get up to thirty-two on just one hand, which is simpler in that you can have the child focus on just one hand. Then again, what do I know. Maybe one of you more math- and/or education-minded types can field that one.
It's probably just another manual fixation.
For an encore I'm attempting addition, which involves breaking it all down into binary parts (17+19=16+1+16+2+1). Subtraction's harder because when it comes to performing ordered tasks in my head, I don't work backwards as well as I do forwards.
Scott wonders if this might not be a better way to teach math to children, if not pragmatically--in a mostly decimal world, a binary child would be at a disadvantage initially--then at least theoretically; it might have the potential to help those who don't do well in arithmetic. It makes sense to me, who as a former English major has just as much authority on the matter as a law student. You can get up to thirty-two on just one hand, which is simpler in that you can have the child focus on just one hand. Then again, what do I know. Maybe one of you more math- and/or education-minded types can field that one.
It's probably just another manual fixation.