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.
50 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 184”
Michi
I wonder where Talita picked up that way of counting. With the little contact she had with Centaurs it is probably not the Centaur way of counting.
Ruby
As someone who has -10 math comprehension this is the most alien thing I have seen in this comic and it has nothing to do with the hand anatomy, I just don’t understand what I’m seeing lol.
Ruby
Wait, I think I’ve cracked it. Every odd number has +1 (makes sense) and 2, 4, 8 and 16 have their own unique finger configuration and all the other even numbers are a summation of those (6 is 2+4, 10 is 2+8, etc). Is this binary counting? What do we call what we usually do (finger 1, finger 2, finger 3…)?
Thisfox
Binary counting, yeah. Finger out = 1, finger folded = 0 by the looks of it.
Michi
Decimal counting (or base 10), you got the numbers 0 to 9 and once you run out of numbers you add another position while resetting the original to 0, i.e. 09 > 10.
Binary count (base 2) has only 0 and 1, so you have to add another position every other count. I.E.
0000 > 0001 > 0010 > 0011 > 0100 > ….
Which is on or off, high voltage or low voltage, finger or no finger. Great for computers and such, but a bit much to keep track of for the human brain not used to it.
If you want you can have any base number system, but I leave that up to you to discover.
jaggedjottings
#9 would go hard at a metal concert.
Origamigryphon
So glad to see her finally relaxing instead of curling in on herself
BravoLimaPoppa
I’m impressed. I used to fence and do sleight of hand (badly) and I don’t have the manual control to stick up third finger without assistance.
Light_In_The_Fog
Since her hand is symmetrical I’m guessing it doesn’t have anything like that weird limitation we have from connected tendons
Stray Cat
I picked up binary finger-counting as a skill (and a stim) because of this webcomic. Can confirm that getting to a full hand is quite satisfying. I keep getting lost past 5 fingers though.
Hunter
I imagine that centaurs think in a different base of math than we do. Base 16 perhaps.
AnaKaye
Talita wouldn’t, though, because she was raised by humans in a human culture and had essentially no contact with other centaurs.
SheTheTDE
Hang on to 16 on one hand with only 4 digits? That’s amazing
Aidan
binary counting for the win
JoB
Actually, since each of Talitas fingers seems to have three joints (and assuming that something like having a finger go bent-straight-bent would be too difficult to do), she could possibly use every one as a quaternary digit and count to 4^4 = 256 on a single hand …
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!
Stray Cat
When I saw this page, my first reaction was, “Oh! That’s why the chapter started with Talita counting on her fingers – to set this moment up!”
And it looks like that conversation helped Gillie realise, among other things, that she needed to approach the question of adapting ASL for Talita from a different angle. It’ll be interesting to see Gillie’s reasoning for this approach.
Ghostly gardener
can confirm, it is possible for human fingers, but for more polite counting, i recommend interpreting the 2nd finger (non including thumbs) from the left as the finger next to the pinky (dont know what the word for it is) rather than the middle finger
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
Bœrœng
I find it kind of funny how some of Talita’s hand positions could have simply been mirrored since her hands are symetrical, but I guess Jay just really enjoys drawing hands
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]
Light_In_The_Fog
wait huh?! where can I learn more about this I must learn about trinary computers
JoB
I don’t think that humans have ever built a computer that was neither analog, nor working with binary “physical digits”, nor an experimental quantum one using qubits, but trinary computers have been pondered in theory (IIRC “fuzzy logic” was a key term in suggesting a real-world purpose for them), actual computers/chips may have makebelieve non-binary “digits” (as in using an encoding limiting the state space, think BCD, for example), and early computers did use machine words that were nota power-of-two number of bits (e.g., 31 or 45, to name only the figuratively and literally odd ones).
Michi
The Russians build one experimental ternary computer back in the day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
Appart from that, ternary logic would be your search term of choice.
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.
JoB
Once she has counted all the way to 17^6 = 24,137,569, she’s earned the right to lie flat on her back! 😛
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*.