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]

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...)