BASES Let's talk a bit about binary. And decimal. And hexadecimal. Don't panic. You know 1+1=2, yes? 2+2=4? 4+4=8? Of course you do. You can count them on your fingers. Now what's 6+6? You know it's 12, but it isn't really. It's 2 fingers and 1 lot of all the fingers. We call this base 10. We do this because we have ten fingers. If we had more fingers we'd count in whatever that was. With 12 fingers we'd have 0,1,2,3 ... 7,8,9,⧫,⧪ and the next number would be 10. Which is not what you know as 10, its all the fingers and no fingers. Which is what you'd call 12 but it you had 12 fingers you'd call it ten. Remember at school (I don't) where they'd say 6 plus 6 is two and carry one? Each of the "digits" we use (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) takes one character to write. When you go over 9 it takes two characters to write (1 lot of all the fingers and 0 fingers, or 10). Here is a sum in base ten, which is how we think