Runaway to the Stars: Page 184

You know given this book's whole deal it's a good thing I enjoy drawing hands

Transcript

Gillie: (ASL) Talita! How do you normally count on your hands?

Talita puts a hand on her chin and looks away, frowning.

Talita: Um… it’s not like ASL.

Gillie signs at her forcefully, making Talita turn back with a start.

Gillie: (ASL) Show me!

Talita: Ok.

Talita sits down more comfortably on her rear four legs and holds up a hand. She begins to count with a closed fist, her thumbs postioned outside her curled fingers.

Talita: Zero,

She first opens her right thumb, leaving the other digits curled.

Talita: 1

She next closes her right thumb and extends her right finger, beginning a binary series where curled digits represent zeros, and extended digits represent ones.

The current position of her four-digit hand can be represented as such: 0010

Talita: 2

Hand position: 0011

Talita: 3

Hand position: 0100

Talita: 4

Hand position: 0101

Talita: 5

Hand position: 0110

Talita: 6

Hand position: 0111

Talita: 7

Hand position: 1000

Talita: 8

Hand position: 1001

Talita: 9

Hand position: 1010

Talita: 10

Hand position: 1011

Talita: 11

Hand position: 1100

Talita: 12

Hand position: 1101

Talita: 13

Hand position: 1110

Talita: 14

Hand position: 1111

Talita: 15

On the last hand position, Talita repeats the closed fist, but this time with the thumbs inside the curled fingers.

Talita: 16.

 

 

Runaway to the Stars: Page 184

You know given this book's whole deal it's a good thing I enjoy drawing hands

Transcript

Gillie: (ASL) Talita! How do you normally count on your hands?

Talita puts a hand on her chin and looks away, frowning.

Talita: Um… it’s not like ASL.

Gillie signs at her forcefully, making Talita turn back with a start.

Gillie: (ASL) Show me!

Talita: Ok.

Talita sits down more comfortably on her rear four legs and holds up a hand. She begins to count with a closed fist, her thumbs postioned outside her curled fingers.

Talita: Zero,

She first opens her right thumb, leaving the other digits curled.

Talita: 1

She next closes her right thumb and extends her right finger, beginning a binary series where curled digits represent zeros, and extended digits represent ones.

The current position of her four-digit hand can be represented as such: 0010

Talita: 2

Hand position: 0011

Talita: 3

Hand position: 0100

Talita: 4

Hand position: 0101

Talita: 5

Hand position: 0110

Talita: 6

Hand position: 0111

Talita: 7

Hand position: 1000

Talita: 8

Hand position: 1001

Talita: 9

Hand position: 1010

Talita: 10

Hand position: 1011

Talita: 11

Hand position: 1100

Talita: 12

Hand position: 1101

Talita: 13

Hand position: 1110

Talita: 14

Hand position: 1111

Talita: 15

On the last hand position, Talita repeats the closed fist, but this time with the thumbs inside the curled fingers.

Talita: 16.

 

 

21 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 184

  1. it wouldn’t be too hard to adapt asl numbers for her, i bet. 0-3 and 10 could be kept essentially the same, 4 and 5 could be changed a bit but still recognizable, but 6-9 might be tricky… once you figure that out though, every number after that is pretty much taken care of

  2. [has just realized, after documenting a hypervisor’s worth of VMs, that NetBox uses decimal prefixes for RAM and disk sizes (1 GB = 1000 MB) while KVM tools partly prefer binary ones (1 GiB = 1024 MiB)]
    ·
    … as the saying goes, the nice (har har) thing about (numerical) standards is that there are so many of them to choose from … :-3

    1. I like “4” the most =)

  3. I was going to say “oh no! Overflow! but realized it isn’t since at 0 it looks like the outer fingers are over the middle ones, and at 16 the inner fingers are over the thumbs.

  4. well, after an attempt, i can say this is possible but somewhat sore for human hands to do!

  5. Thank you so much for showing us Talita’s binary counting system in so much detail, this is beautiful!

  6. Oh cool, she counts in binary to a hexadecimal base. Given that she works a lot with hardware and electronics I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s had to get into low level software with some of that. Probably made opening up hex editors intuitive for her if she’s ever had to do so.

    1. Avians: [have built trinary-based computers with word sizes of multiples of 13 and filled the hydrolysis plant with those just for the heck of it]

  7. I wonder if a teacher at school taught her how to count this way, or if she decided to do it herself.

  8. That’s actually how I count! With five fingers I can get up to 31 on a single hand. Gotta be really careful with “four” though

    1. Oh that’s impressive. Most people don’t have the motor control for that, and I don’t think I physically can do that. Like the tendons connecting my last three digits are interconnected in a way that makes it near impossible and pretty painful to do. That’s really cool though that you can!

      1. I do something similar, but I press the tip of each activated finger against my palm instead of extending it. Makes it a little easier to move individual fingers in the necessary combinations!

  9. Took me reading the comments to realise it’s a binary system, how and at what age did she start counting like that? 😮 also even though she has four fingers they all move well independently unlike humans’, that’s gonna help for signing at least

  10. if she uses both hands, that’s a whole byte right there!

    1. There are 17 hand positions, so she can count from 0 to 288.
      But what if she uses all six limbs? Her toes seem to be as flexible as fingers.

      1. She probably could in a pinch, but using the ones she’s actually standing on would be akward, but if she just needed to hold a number in her head and not show others it could work.

  11. Ooh this is so tricky to follow along with human hands! I do not have as much independent control over my ring finger as I assumed I have, hah

    1. That can be improved with effort. I didn’t used to be able to do the Spock hand and with practice now I can, so you can probably stretch yourself to gain the capability of binary hand counting.

  12. OHHH its so Gillie can see how she naturally moves her hands when communicating Some sort of information (numbers, in this case), isn’t it!!

  13. ooh, binary counting with yer hands, I do that, I get an extra digit than Talita though

  14. The fact that she uses binary on her fingers is *fantastic*.

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