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

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I was trying to work out which of the women on my FL would answer "yes" to this, and you were the one of whom I was most certain :-)

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

An age mapping of the responses might also shed some light. I only know them because of having computers in the 80s and mucking about ineffectually with graphics and assembler. People 10 or 15 years younger doing the same things are I would guess less likely to learn the underlying numbers because the tools are so much better.

[phantas.livejournal.com]

oh the 16 bit registers...

[phantas.livejournal.com]

heh! I would expect you to have many computer geeks in you FL so I'm flattered. :D In a "oh, she knows her powers of two!" kind of way o_O