We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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That is so nerdy When I arrived home from work yesterday I discovered a package had arrived for me. I suspected that it was a Christmas present from my sister, and this was later confirmed. I opened it, and found this.
Yes, that’s right. It’s a clock that tells the time in binary, using flashing blue LEDs. To tell the truth, it has a nice “dawn of computing” feel about it, harkening back to the days when input devices were more primitive. Of course, they didn’t have blue LEDs back in the dawn of computing (or even in 1990 for that matter) but I will forgive that.
Alas, I can only conclude that my sister knows me too well.
(Actually, it only sort of tells the time in binary. Each vertical row of LEDs gives the binary for one decimal digit of the time. So the time as shown in the photograph is 21:26:25).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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It’s real binary, just in a packed BCD format.
And that concludes today’s episode of obscure techno-marginalia. It confused me the first time I saw it, but in retrospect it makes sense. A more thoroughly binary number (say milliseconds since epoch) would probably be less than useful.
Well yes, we could all see that at a glance!
Had anything else really useful this xmas?
My soap on a rope relations are dieing off alas.
Bugger,
Here I was, all excited at the opportunity of being able to show off the true depths of my own nerdyness, only to find Scott had beaten me to it.
Drat, foiled again.
Yeah, packed BCD.
But milliseconds from the epoch would alow us to so easily work out so many other things.
A unified method of both dating and time keeping!! Such a much more sensible way of doing things.
The book, Perry. You (subconsciously?) want to tell us about the book. In which section of Waterstones can I find it, btw, popular science?
Sorry, I meant Michael.
I love my binary clock!
I have the red LED version. It keeps pretty good time too.
Serious geek points.
Biggest.
Nerd.
Ever.
Merry Christmas.
As they say:
There’s only 10 types of people:
Those that get binary and those that don’t….
Toodle Pip!
PG
I’ve got one myself, a gift from my uncle. It bathes my living room in its soothing, eerie blue glow at night.
“As they say:
There’s only 10 types of people:
Those that get binary and those that don’t….
Toodle Pip!
PG”
Actually, that would code for 4 people types.
The correct statement would be”
There’s only 1 types of people….
The cases being 0 and 1.
The One’s case being those who “Get” binary, and the Zero’th case being those who don’t.