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Comment by yogsototh | Hacker News Reader

I count to 31 with one hand.

I use the standard count up to 5 with one hand just for communication purpose.

I use base six, with one hand being 6s and one hand being 1s. It's a tradeoff between counting capacity and ease of calculation.

I used to do that, but found some of the various combinations too difficult to maintain. I tend to count to 10 on each hand, counting the thumb as five and a fist as ten.

Slightly more efficient, and still easy to do, is to use one hand for 0-9 (thumb counts as five), and the other for 0,10,20,...,90. Easy counting, setting, and reading of the current number.

Er, that's exactly what I meant. Sorry if I didn't make it clear, but I never considered that someone would believe I counted to 10 on one hand, then another 10 on the other.

how? I can understand 12 (use your thumb to count the 3 joints on each of your 4 fingers), but 31?

Binary. Five (biological) digits giving 5 bits.

So color me confused - your profile says:

  > I love hardware hacking
  > and low-level programming.

How can you not see 31 and think "5 bits" ?

That's a cool solution!

In answer to your question: because I'm still learning. I'm in my first year at university, and while I love working with microcontrollers, a lot of the knowledge hasn't quite got there. I'm working on it!

Also, I forgot about starting at zero (yeah, I know).

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