Question: please explain your joke, we dont understand!

Tim Craggs answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Hi Abigail,

The joke says:

There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who don’t.

The joke is supposed to funny (sorry if it is not!) because 10 can mean both ten (in a decimal, base 10 system) but also 2 (in a binary system) so if you understand binary, you understand the joke, but if you don’t, then it doesn’t make sense, so I thought it was quite clever, but maybe a bit geeky!

In base 10 you have the units as 1-9 then the next column tells you how many 10’s you have, so the number 24 (for example) means you have 2 tens, and 4 units, which is 24. The next column in the hundreds column, which is 10 squared (or 10 to the power 2, 10 x 10)

So the number 475 means we have 4 hundreds (or 4 lots of 10 squared) plus 7 lots of ten, plus 5 units.

Are you still with me?

The next column in base 10 is thousands (which is 10 cubed, 10 x 10 x 10). You get the gist!

So in binary the fist column is units, or ones. The second column is 2’s. The third column is 2 x 2 = 4’s (like the third column in base 10 was hundreds, 10 x 10). The fourth column is 2 x 2 x 2 = 8’s.

So 10 in binary = 2

here is a question for you:

what is 10011001 in binary?

Here is a website that helps – http://www.wikihow.com/Convert-from-Binary-to-Decimal

Hope that explains it all!

Tim