You see, OCT 31 = DEC 25
Love this!
For those unfamiliar: converting 31 from base 8 (octal aka OCT) to base 10 (decimal aka DEC) equals 25.
I first saw this joke on bash.org twenty or thirty years ago and it’s been my go to ever since. I had to fight to resist posting it until at least the week of Halloween.
A fun anecdote about this joke, I once interviewed at NASA. It was a hard choice, but I ended up turning down the job. A few months later, my wife and I went to a birthing class and ended up chatting with the couple in front of us. Turns out the guy worked at NASA and actually knew the person who interviewed me. After getting an understanding of his role, I told him this joke.
He laughed. His wife turned to mine and said “what are they laughing about?” My wife said “I don’t know. Math, I think.”
“Math I think” 😂
I can definitely relate to hearing similar to my wife lol. I originally intended to pursue a career in mathematics bit ended up moving into tech and actually programming. Worked out well in the end 😊
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand Octal, and 7 others who don’t.
I know this as: There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who know binary and those who don’t.
Yes, but your post’s joke is Octal, so I did the base conversion for you
There are 2 types of people in this world:
- Those who can make inferences from incomplete information.
Fair enough. Now let’s debate the merits of modal and octal WRT adjusting file permissions.
There are 10 types of people in the world.
- Those who know binary.
- Those who don’t
- Those who know gray code
I do now. Interesting 🤔
Interesting, this merits further reading, thanks!
I am the 7. You guys are nerds. I love you.
Fantastic translation, adds to it too IMO! 😄
TIL
You’ve stumbled upon forbidden knowledge
Drop this now before things are never the same for you again
As a kid I read a story, I think by Bruce Coville, wherein the protagonist discovers the ability to … Er, I don’t quite recall. I think he manages to “slip into the folds of the universe” or something like that. Whatever he manages, it gives him a full understanding of how everything works.
The end result is that he loses all joy because there’s no wonder left in the world for him. I think the closing scene in the story is him wandering into carnival machinery, being told by staff that it’ll ruin the surprise, and him saying he doesn’t care because he already understands the machinations.
Holy hell
Most of the folks here can barely handle multiples of 10, let alone 8 or 12.
I think the proportion of math literate people on Lemmy is higher than it is in many places.
Here’s a lowbrow math joke you can fallback to if the first one goes over their heads:
Q: How did the mathematician relieve his constipation?
A: He worked it out with a pencil!
My brow has never been more furrowed than after reading this.
Not furrowed in confusion, I hope?? That’s about as low as my brow goes.
No, I get it. I was trying to be funny but couldn’t think of any actually good wordplay to joke about being lowbrow. Here, in apology for the quality of my vocabulary, I’ll offer a counter:
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician are given a challenge: open a can without a can opener.
The engineer throws the can against a hard surface over and over again until it breaks.
The physicist does some calculations, puts pressure on a few points on the can, and finds satisfaction when the can promptly pops open.
The mathematician is later found staring at the can, muttering "assume the can is open … "
(I looked this up to make sure I remembered the details … It’s surprising how many methods the engineer and physicist are proclaimed to have used, while the punchline is always basically the same.)
By contradiction he proved the can cannot be open and is therefore closed. This is easy. This means the room they’re in is open (the compliment). If we close that up the can should open.
