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The next time you're throwing a birthday party for the office geek, here's an easy idea he or she will appreciate, that also helps if candles are in short supply. Instead of, say, lighting 35 candles for their 35rd birthday, put six candles in a line on the cake, but only light the first, fifth, and
sixth ones. When they ask what's going on with that, tell them, "It's in binary."
Counting in Binary
http://en.wikipedia...nary_numeral_system
Courtesy of our friends at the wikipedia [shapu, Feb 09 2005]
BAKED!
http://www.evilmads...icle.php/binarybday
Long after posting, but EMSL made one. [bleh, May 13 2009]
[link]
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Nice. Until you get your paycheck and you're like, 'What the...?' and they're like, 'It's in base 400.' |
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Or you could use the E24 resistor code and then you'd just need 2 candles, plus one more for the tolerance. |
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Tolerance... I'm 29 and holding.. (+/- 10%) |
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You could decorate the cake with cookies, carefully laid out in binary. |
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I like this. At my last birthday we ran out of fire extinguishers. |
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Very nice. In fact, seven candles should be enough for
anyone (representing 2^0 to 2^6) as you can represent
any age up to 127. Candles should therefore be sold in a
block of seven, joined together, and the same block can
be used for many years. It will represent a significant rite
of passage when you first use the 2^4 candle. |
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I have no idea how to read binary, but you get a (+) for having such a wonderful idea to go with the title. |
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With some 16 bit (candle) flip-flops (cakes), one could do some elementary operations thus halfbaking the first birthday cake computer. |
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[UB] Yes but how would you represent five distinct states
with one candle? |
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[Rods] - how about we make the directional distinction obvious? Let's see, the least significant candle would need to be about an inch high; the "two" could be double that, and so by the time you got to the MSB it would... oops. Never mind. |
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//You could get a tri-state candle by having a hard 'on' state// |
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No good, Rods. I've been trying all morning & it won't play ball. |
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If you represent your age in binary on the cake, you could use public key encryption to ensure that only your special friends found out how old you were. |
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[FarmJohn]//With some 16 bit (candle) flip-flops (cakes), one could do some elementary operations thus halfbaking the first birthday cake computer.// I wish I could rate your comment a [+]!! |
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//seven candles should be enough for anyone //... that, and about 64K. |
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The problem with learning binary on your fingers is the number 4. |
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The family of my ex-girlfriend had a tradition of representing age in cake candles by any method except standard unary. I'm pretty sure they did binary by leaving candleless gaps for the zeros. Thanks for the reminder of happy times :-). |
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Stupid, stupid, stupid idea. From one side of the table, you're 35, from the other side, you're 49. [-] |
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If the "Happy Birthday" writing is upside down then so is your view of the cake and the candles. Not immediately realizing this glaringly obvious fact is stupid, stupid, stupid. ;-) |
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Excellent! Evil Mad Scientist made one for you. <linky> |
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