Many thanks to Tristan Morris for creating a beautiful illustrated hardcover print edition of the site

tcc-case-title
moderately geeky  moderately geeky

Case 47

The Origin of All

Painted on the tiles of a lavatory near Java master Bawan’s office: *

The text 'Where binary numbers really come from', over a picture of many digital 1s swimming up to fertilize a large digital 0.
* Some observations by the Editor:
  • This means that every binary number has both sex chromosomes, except for numbers of the form (2^n)-1 where n >= 0.
  • It also means that bitwise complement (~) is the Sex-Change Operation.
  • It would be natural to assign gender to binary integers as follows: even numbers (ending in 0) are female, and odd numbers (ending in 1) are male. But speaking personally, I would find it disconcerting if someone referred to the anatomical feature that defines my sexuality as my Least Significant Bit.
Topics...  binary numbers, zero, one