What are binary numbers? | James May's Q&A (Ep 11100) | Head Squeeze

James May asks "What are binary numbers, and why does my computer need them?






James May's Q&A: With his own unique spin, James May asks and answers the oddball questions we've all wondered about from 'What Exactly Is One Second?' to 'Is Invisibility Possible?'

[AristotelisMitsiou]

I've got another "byte" joke:

There's a band called 1023 MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

[slipknotk]

Jeremy clarkson told me to sleep halfway through this clip.

[GroovingPict]

there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who dont... and those who didnt expect a ternary joke.

[oksquall]

That would've been really handy for my first year of programming.

[LuckyNobody]

I've seen a couple of binary videos from different people on Youtube, and this seems to have the most simplistic description of how to form the number... I'm impressed

[boy]

Top Gear is back and he still takes the time to film headsqueeze! Appreciate it! :D

[TytoProductions]

All that happened when I high-tenned the screen was some smudge marks.

[strangergamez]

for people who cant understand

128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
x x x x x x x x
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

this would be 129 because
128+1=129
there are 1s under those
start from right going left and times the number by 2, for every 1, add the number needed to the number

[yesitislewis]

I have to watch this for online homework,
ah

[blazewebsdale]

I love how I’m at school watching this

[spepuddin]

I took a networking class in college and spent a week on binary. What took a professor a week you did in a few minutes. Glad I am subscribed.

[Kaslai]

This is a perfect example of what happens when a niche market explodes in to general use. Nobody really cared that the prefixes were used incorrectly until relatively recently. My guess is that kibi, mibi, etc prefixes came about after people who didn't know how computers are manufactured started complaining.

[bozy]

james, you are the first English person who said people have 10 fingers!! 
finally an English person that agrees with me when i say humans have TEN fingers, not 8 and 2 thumbs 

[esthergiron]

This totally helped me understand binary numbers since I am currently learning them in my math class. Thank you! :)

[Caldera]

1. The fact you don't count in some system is not mutually exclusive from not being able to. I have no idea what systems you can, or cannot count in.

2. Your point on "useless information" once again, is exactly the point I made originally. Thanks for finally understanding that.

3. Infinity exists only in theory, it is however a practical impossibility.

[ElNeroDiablo]

Well, in Decimal/Base 10, your fingers (and thumbs) can only equal a max of (ten), whilst in Binary/Base 2, if a finger is curled or extended it represents other 0 (curled) or 1 (extended). Starting from the right thumb (palms facing you) as (one) and each digit position to the left doubling in value (eg: right index = 2 whilst right pinky = 16... left thumb = 512), you can reach 1023 which if you tried to add another 1 to it, it'd roll over to 1024 and you'd need an 11th digit to count it.

[unamaxify]

you should watch this several times, it's one of the better explanations here on youtube

[tiagosr]

And about the 256 options of each component, there are systems which use more information for each component of the pixel - workstations which do image processing and FX for movies and animation normally work with 2 bytes for each component, which gives 65536 variations for each. It so happens that the display tech that we use every day is not able to describe those variations precisely - most of the time even the 256 variations are beyond what is possible on an LCD screen, for example.

[magnificientmagnus]

Letters or characters are also stored in the form of codes (ASCII).
1 Letter requires 1 Byte or 8 bits to be stored. Character 'A' has an ASCII code 65 in decimal system or in binary. There are 256 ascii characters from 0 to 255. 255 is (notice 8 bits) in binary.

[Zolbat]

I am sorry for misspelling this word. A fuzz is a guitar effect that's really noisy, so in my mind it fitted well with the meaning of "fuss". I also want to point out, that english is not my first language, and I think you still got the point of what I was saying. Back to topic: It doesn't make much difference in every day use whether you send a file that's 1KB or 1KiB big, the other person gets a good idea about how big the file really is. If you need to be accurate though you just use Byte.