Check this out. We all know how to count to ten on our fingers. Well guess what? You can actually count to 31 on one hand and a whopping 1023 on two hands. It's easy. Your fingers represents digit positions in a binary number. That means that with a given number of fingers, X, you can count to 2^X - 1 (where '^' means 'to the power of'). On one hand, there are five fingers, so this is 2^5 - 1, which equals thirty-one. Here are the hand representations for each of the thirty-two numbers in the range zero through thirty-one (right hand palm up or left hand palm down, it doesn't really matter): |
