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.
29 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 184”
SheTheTDE
Hang on to 16 on one hand with only 4 digits? That’s amazing
Lilac
I don’t think i quite Comprehended her hoof fingernails until this page…. among other details….. god i love creature design so much ohh my god
Momo
everyone else: wow talita so cool! so amazing and smart! i try to do this too
me: talita youre insane
the Inmara
our reaction (with affection): dear talita, YOU ARE A NERD!
Vinemaple
Oh. OHHHH.
Folks, the title of this chapter is, “Binary counting!”
I love how Gillie just jumps right in with step 1 of adapting Sign… clearly that was the right way to go about it! “Please help me adapt ASL for your hands” sounds daunting and imposing, but “How do you count on your fingers?” is a simple, easy question!
sprigg
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
JoB
[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)]
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… as the saying goes, the nice (har har) thing about (numerical) standards is that there are so many of them to choose from … :-3
Tyrone
I like “4” the most =)
SparroHawc
I’m pretty fond of 132, myself.
DasGanon
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.
HAL9000
well, after an attempt, i can say this is possible but somewhat sore for human hands to do!
Vinemaple
Combining the middle and ring fingers is how I chose to do it
7arty
0 and 16 seem the hardest to me since you can’t just make a fist, you gotta overlay/underlay your thumb (easy) and pinky (oof ouch hard) over the rest of the fingers
Chrysalis
Thank you so much for showing us Talita’s binary counting system in so much detail, this is beautiful!
Astra
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.
JoB
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]
Greebus
I wonder if a teacher at school taught her how to count this way, or if she decided to do it herself.
beta
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
Astra
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!
Chrysalis
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!
AnormalADN
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
Claire
if she uses both hands, that’s a whole byte right there!
pelya
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.
Joey Shears
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.
Matt
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
A Box Of Fox
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.
abyss
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!!
Amanda/OwlBear
ooh, binary counting with yer hands, I do that, I get an extra digit than Talita though
Nome
The fact that she uses binary on her fingers is *fantastic*.