Once, I was responsible for buying cake, snacks, and candles for a family member’s birthday celebration.
I ordered the cake and snacks, but when I went to pick them up, I had a small problem: the store had no number-shaped candles. They only had plain candles.
Using just one candle was out of the question. At first, I thought about buying as many candles as the person’s age. But since the person was over 20, I thought that would be too many candles on the cake.
Then I had the following nerdy idea: Why not use a sequence of lit and unlit candles to represent the age in binary format instead of decimal? Since the age was less than 32, I soon realized that five candles would be enough to represent it, rather than the more than 20 I first thought of.
The cake and the sequence of candles were arranged as shown in the picture below:
A lit candle represents the number 1 (one), and an unlit candle represents the number 0 (zero). So the sequence of candles represents the number 11001 (one, one, zero, zero, one). It may seem a little strange at first, but that’s exactly what you read. The birthday greeting goes: “Happy one, one, zero, zero, one years!” :)
Note: Before the birthday person blew out the candles, I had to explain a little about binary numbers. The idea was well received. Phew! :)
Now try to guess what age this binary number represents in decimal. If you’re in a hurry, type the following into Google: 0b11001 in decimal and press Enter, or simply click the link above.
Best wishes.