Powers of two

[ciphergoth]

I can't remember what made me think of this, but there's a bit in Snow Crash about powers of two, and I wondered if things had changed, and that people deal in higher level stuff than this these days. And it's just striking and a bit weird anyway that some people have had occasion to memorize this stuff, I wondered if you had...

[Poll #1217360]

Update: The "powers of two" are just 1+1 = 2, 2+2 = 4, 4+4 = 8, 8+8 = 16 and so on.

Update: it seems like it isn't clear from the above, so for the avoidance of doubt, no-one should feel that they should know this off by heart!

Comments

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

16384 is my only shaky one.

I note that right now the poll responses look like: 15, 7, 1. Which is nice.

But does anyone know 2^17?

[phantas.livejournal.com]

I can tell you that 2^17 - 1 is not a prime

ETA: arg, sorry, shouldn't make claims of (non) primality at 1h30AM.

[uke.livejournal.com]

heehee!

[zwol.livejournal.com]

131072. I think.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Correct -- you win an internet! (Formatted as a pcap dump file, natch -- you get to decode it yourself.)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

It's what I've always wanted.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

16384 is my blind spot too! I wonder whether it's more common than other numbers in other people?

I also can't put that sentence together.

[skx.livejournal.com]

Thats the one I always remember, as that was the address that the video was mapped to on my ZX Spectrum - hours of fun poking random bitpatterns there ..

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

After I realized I knew up to 2^16 without thinking, I tried to memorize more. I can do 2^17 = 131072 and 2^18 = 262144 but I never got further than that.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

That seems to contradict your second update a bit, at least in spirit :-)

Next you'll be putting up a poll for how many decimal digits of pi people know ;-)

(12 -- mostly after I noticed that the initial bit was a local phone number in San Francisco, back in the pre-cell days when people still memorized phone numbers as a matter of course. I've always been tempted to try calling it, but it seems rude...)