I’m sorry, but the statement on this shirt is misleading and totally incorrect. I wish it were cooler, because it has so much potential, but whoever made it doesn’t know the first thing about how a base-2 numbering system works. They obviously just asked a CS major in their dorm what “2” is in binary. What they fail to grasp is that 2 to people is actually three to computers.
The shirt says, “There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” The statement implies that everyone falls into one of two categories. What’s misleading is that if you wanted to write an Arabic two in binary it is in fact 10.
I know it’s confusing. Let’s consider an example where you have a computer over for dinner. You and the computer enjoy a wonderful meal and for dessert you plan to have ice cream. If you tell the computer that the number of ice cream flavors in the freezer is “2” it’s going to think there are actually three different kinds.
Now, the computer’s not trying to be difficult. There’s actually a good reason for this. When a computer needs to count a series of something it starts at zero, not at one like all of us sensible human beings do. If you wanted to tell the computer in binary that there are three flavors of ice cream you would need to tell it there are 1 (sic) flavors.
That being said, if you starting counting at one, as all sensible people would, decimal 2 would be 1 in binary. It really doesn’t work as a joke, even when you consider that “computer” number series start at zero, unless you state otherwise. Zero is always zero whether it’s in binary, decimal, octal, hexadecimal, or some other really weird numbering system. And one is one. But what value you have assigned to those symbols is what really matters. I won’t even tell you what sixteen is in hexadecimal.
The moral of this is don’t buy this shirt if you want intelligent people to think you are a computer nerd. Should you encounter anyone with half a brain while wearing this shirt you will only wind up looking like a fool for being unable to explain why 10 is actually two in binary and why that two doesn’t mean three.
Oh, and sixteen in hexadecimal is F. Just the letter F. F is for Fail.
QuantumTom 