Blogger, I apologize for dissing your new-fangled editor. I was hurt because when it messed up my old postings, it made me feel like I had been foolish to choose to use it, wasting my time, and tweaking that core hurt in my gut that tells me I’m a loser.
Oh, Blogger, you’re not responsible for my core hurts, no one is. My job is just to realize that now is now and I am what I think and to decide to think more about tomorrow than yesterday.
It is possible to know your future: You thought it today.
Oh, the Blogger editor is actually better. You can put in multiple images and drag them around. This is going to save me lots of time. The reason it nuked some of the formatting in my old postings was an incompatibility between the format in which those files were written and the format for which the editor was configured concerning the encoding of paragraph endings as “newlines” (which is an ASCII Decimal 10 byte) or the text/HTML element “br.” Whew.
Do you remember when I said that I’m always writing dates this way: 6/5/A?
June 5th, 2010.
A is hexadecimal for 10.
Hexadecimal is the name for a numbering system which is based on 16 values in each place rather than the comfortable 10 values we’re used to seeing in the decimal system.
So, when you count to 16 in hexadecimal, you count: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 10
F is 15. Then the count is full, so you write “10” which means 1×16 and 0x1.
Hexadecimal is used by computer programmers to represent quantities of or locations in computer memory. It’s easier to do the math and to visualize where things are and what is happening inside a computer by thinking in hexadecimal because everything in a computer is binary, and works on powers of two.
A bit is either on, 1, or off, 0.
Bits had to be collected into some sort of order, so the order chosen was 8.
There were to be 8 bits in a byte.
8 is the number of protons in Oxygen.
And Byte was.
The computer really only knows on or off.
There is no third state, or some analog measurement, in a computer chip. In other words, the chip doesn’t know 24 is less than 42, it only knows yes or no.
Electrically, the semiconductor either allows the flow of electrons or does not. It is a logic gate, the basic bit.
So, computers have to be programmed in binary.
Binary looks like this:
0100011101101111011001000010000001101100011011
1101110110011001010111001100100000011110010110
1111011101010010000001100001011011100110010000
1000000111001101101111001000000110010001101111
001000000100100100101110
If you’re adventurous, you’ll try to decode that. There might be binary to text (ASCII) converters on the web that will decode the message… Okay, I know there are because I used this one to make the string. It’s fun to see what binary looks like.
ASCII is a codebook used to decipher numbers to letters. For instance, the decimal value 65 represents a capital “A” in the ASCII table.
The ASCII table has all sorts of symbols necessary to communicate, including the asterisk, *.
The asterisk is used to represent the multiplication function on a computer. We wrote an “x” on paper, and said “6 times 7” is 42. On a computer 6 * 7 = 42.
Multiplication is the most powerful primary mathematical operator.
To insert a wildcard into a query for a database search, it is customary to use the asterisk. For instance, you could ask the computer to please bring up all customers named, Smith*, and you get Smith, Smithson, Smithsonson, Smithers, Smithway, etc.
In other words, the asterisk stands for anything. If you can be anything, that means you can be everything, the most powerful state of being.
Getting along with everyone is the most powerful state of socialization.
42 is an important number in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book by Douglas Adams, God rest his soul. It’s the answer to the question about Life, the Universe, and Everything.
In the ASCII table, the asterisk (*) is represented by the decimal number, 42.
I love you!
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