|
It's best if you read
the page on binary
first.
Humans use the decimal
digits zero to nine
because they have ten
fingers.
Penguins are limited to
using binary zeros and
ones because they have
only two flippers.
Well Martians have 16
fingers, so they have
sixteen digits, which
they call kpxvz to zxkyt,
where kpxvz is the same
as our zero. Their maths
system is called
hexadecimal, (hex for
short).
When we translate
Martian to Human we can
use 0 to 9 for the first
ten Martian fingers
because they they are
the same.
Humans haven't any words
for the Martian numbers
for the remaining six
fingers, oggfv to zxkyt.
The best we can do is to
use the letters A B C D
E F where A is
equivalent to oggfv and
F represents zxkyt.
So translating Martian
(hexadecimal) we use the
following (binary
equivalents are
included).
|
decimal |
hex |
binary
|
|
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15 |
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
B
C
D
E
F |
0000
0001
0010
0011
0100
0101
0110
0111
1000
1001
1010
1011
1100
1101
1110
1111 |
So 000F hex is the same
as decimal 15.
0010 hex is the
same as decimal 16
0100 hex is the
same as decimal 256
1000 hex is the
same as decimal 4096
1111 hex =
4096+256+16+1=?
00FF=255
FFFF=65535
Prove it.
In some computers,
information is stored as
16 bit binary numbers.
Imagine typing in
hundreds of these
numbers without making a
mistake.
1111011111001101
We can make life
somewhat easier by
breaking this into four
sections.
1111 0111
1100 1101
and converting into the
hex equivalent.
F
7 C D
or F7CD. Easier to
type!
|
