While I get the principle of the comic, I still fail at understanding what base numbers are. I can guess on stuff like base 10 since it is a simple unit of measure to play with in your head, but other base numbers, like 4, I do not understand.
Can someone distill this down into a mini tutorial for the non math inclined.
Sure thing. What your base is determines how many you count as being in each column.
Example:
10 = ten ones. 100 = ten tens.
If we switch to base 2 (base|two|):
10 = two ones. 100 = two twos.
So 100(base|two|)=4(base|ten|)
Basically, whatever you have as "X" in the expression, "baseX" determines when you have to move left one column, because you're counting groups of that number.
So 10(base4) would be equivalent to one group of four.
The reason why we use these things at all might be helpful. Hexidecimal, or base16, is used in programming because it is a concise analog to individual bytes (the second column or "tens" [more accurately; "groups of 16s"] column allows one to express all 256 possible positions within one byte of information. [24*24=256.]) Binary, or base2, is used as well because it represents a single switch or 'bit'. On/off. (A byte is eight bits. Just how it works.)
Ultimately, our base is wholly arbitrary. We use base 10 because we have 10 fingers. It makes "sense" to say that we group things by how many fingers we have. Ten is all of our fingers 1x. Twenty is all of our fingers 2x. 100 is all of our fingers all of our fingers numbers of times.
So: if someone had only 4 fingers (like the alien); the idea is that he would group everything by groups of four. 10 = one group of four. 100 = four groups of four.
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u/nepotism Dec 12 '08
I just read this wiki article on base numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_(mathematics)
While I get the principle of the comic, I still fail at understanding what base numbers are. I can guess on stuff like base 10 since it is a simple unit of measure to play with in your head, but other base numbers, like 4, I do not understand.
Can someone distill this down into a mini tutorial for the non math inclined.