Why do computer scientists always confuse Halloween and Christmas?
October 31st, 2007
Happy Halloween!
Computer scientists deal with various number systems. In addition to the Decimal (Base-10) number system, which everybody uses, computer scientists use number systems such as Binary (base-2), Octal (Base-8), and Hexadecimal (Base-16). Computer scientists even come up with many jokes about number systems.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who know Binary and those who don’t.
Does this sentence make sense to you? Which category do you belong to? If you are a CS major and you fall into the second category, come to my office and get educated. This sentence also has a math version:
There are three kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can’t.
I certainly hope you fall into the first category.
Why do computer scientists always confuse Halloween and Christmas?
Because Oct 31 and Dec 25 look the same (value) to us. I will let you ponder on why I say so.
