What are binary numbers? | James May's Q&A (Ep 11100)

What are binary numbers? | James May's Q&A (Ep 11100) | Head Squeeze

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11 жыл бұрын

James May asks "What are binary numbers, and why does my computer need them?
Watch James getting confused here: • BLOOPERS! James May Ge...
Binary: mathworld.wolfram.com/Binary.html
Counting in base 10: mae.ucdavis.edu/dsouza/Classes...
James May on how Barcodes work: • How Do Barcodes Work |...
Follow us on twitter: / theheadsqueeze
Like is on Facebook: / headsqueeze
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kzfaq.info_c...
James May's Q&A: With his own unique spin, James May asks and answers the oddball questions we've all wondered about from 'What Exactly Is One Second?' to 'Is Invisibility Possible?'

Пікірлер: 670

@AristotelisMitsiou 9 жыл бұрын

I've got another "byte" joke: There's a band called 1023 MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

@stormblazer9991 9 жыл бұрын

1024*

@AristotelisMitsiou 9 жыл бұрын

Adham Rataba You didn't get it, did you?

@stormblazer9991 9 жыл бұрын

***** Oh, now I realised! They needed one more 'byte' to become a 'gig'! LOL, I get it now, thanks for telling me.

@AristotelisMitsiou 9 жыл бұрын

Adham Rataba No problem.

@Xomsabre 7 жыл бұрын

Technically, 1 more MegaByte....Also, that joke is a bit old..... I'll be leaving now....

@slipknot2k4 10 жыл бұрын

Jeremy clarkson told me to sleep halfway through this clip.

@sou_1108 3 жыл бұрын

hi person from 6 years ago

@slipknot2k4 3 жыл бұрын

@@sou_1108 hello

@sou_1108 3 жыл бұрын

@@slipknot2k4 hello

@user-kx5wg5ob1c 3 жыл бұрын

wowwww

@rte3y838 2 жыл бұрын

are you still active

@Wozzatron 4 жыл бұрын

anyone else here for online homework

@kxcyh 4 жыл бұрын

Yep

@xxsimmz07xx14 4 жыл бұрын

Yes sir

@Julia-tm2pt 4 жыл бұрын

me yes sir

@will-ys6th 4 жыл бұрын

Yep

@ChillBoi1 4 жыл бұрын

@GroovingPict 8 жыл бұрын

there are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary, those who dont... and those who didnt expect a ternary joke.

@NookRitzia 8 жыл бұрын

+GroovingPict 10 ;p that is 2 in binary ;p

@GroovingPict 8 жыл бұрын

+NookRitzia I guess you are that third kind

@qay_6994 8 жыл бұрын

hehehe

@motorman6157 7 жыл бұрын

GroovingPict well if there's 3 don't you mean 11

@invisi. 6 жыл бұрын

Ternary = Base 3 3 in Base 3 is 10

@yesitislewis 3 жыл бұрын

I have to watch this for online homework, ah

@cocoiirblx8333 3 жыл бұрын

Same

@oksquall 11 жыл бұрын

That would've been really handy for my first year of programming.

@TytoProductions 10 жыл бұрын

All that happened when I high-tenned the screen was some smudge marks.

@LuckyNobody 11 жыл бұрын

I've seen a couple of binary videos from different people on KZfaq, and this seems to have the most simplistic description of how to form the number... I'm impressed

@blazewebsdale 4 жыл бұрын

I love how I’m at school watching this

@lennonlouis313 3 жыл бұрын

pro trick : watch movies at flixzone. I've been using them for watching a lot of movies recently.

@novarowen2649 3 жыл бұрын

@Lennon Louis definitely, I've been watching on Flixzone for since november myself =)

@juelzfinley7496 3 жыл бұрын

@Lennon Louis Yup, have been watching on Flixzone for since november myself :D

@juliusjaxxon4411 3 жыл бұрын

@Lennon Louis definitely, been using Flixzone for since november myself =)

@thisisscarlett2216 2 жыл бұрын

Same I am doing it for home work

@strangergamez4380 3 жыл бұрын

for people who cant understand 128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1 x x x x x x x x 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 this would be 129 because 128+1=129 there are 1s under those start from right going left and times the number by 2, for every 1, add the number needed to the number

@oranoosy6911 Жыл бұрын

Thank u

@boy638 11 жыл бұрын

Top Gear is back and he still takes the time to film headsqueeze! Appreciate it! :D

@bozy99 10 жыл бұрын

james, you are the first English person who said people have 10 fingers!! finally an English person that agrees with me when i say humans have TEN fingers, not 8 and 2 thumbs

@jonny9365 7 жыл бұрын

Captain Slow!

@sophiemoo6787 6 жыл бұрын

Your an idiot

@amdcrash2951 5 жыл бұрын

You’re.

@Cogajon 11 жыл бұрын

The pile of computers in the background is hilarious. XD Made my day.

@The55five5 11 жыл бұрын

Thank you, that did help :) I was writing them out starting at 0, and when I wrote the comment I thought I was starting at 1, so I was on the write track just didn't follow what I had written :P That does make it much clearer though! Does that also mean when you are to convert binary to base 10 you would need to read right to left because the values would be 1, 2, 4, 8 etc?

@spepuddin 11 жыл бұрын

I took a networking class in college and spent a week on binary. What took a professor a week you did in a few minutes. Glad I am subscribed.

@zacharydavison7783 2 ай бұрын

my bet is that you liked your own comment

@esthergiron8078 11 жыл бұрын

This totally helped me understand binary numbers since I am currently learning them in my math class. Thank you! :)

@Throwaway_4928 7 ай бұрын

MATH? shouldn't it be ict or cs

@darezzi97 11 жыл бұрын

ah, episode 28 in binary! Nice touch! By the way James May, could you explain to me is perpetual motion even nearly possible? Can we make something that can run, for example 10 years without the need of replacing or recharging it?

@unamaxify 11 жыл бұрын

you should watch this several times, it's one of the better explanations here on youtube

@magnificientmagnus 11 жыл бұрын

Letters or characters are also stored in the form of codes (ASCII). 1 Letter requires 1 Byte or 8 bits to be stored. Character 'A' has an ASCII code 65 in decimal system or 01000001 in binary. There are 256 ascii characters from 0 to 255. 255 is 11111111 (notice 8 bits) in binary.

@tikseye 11 жыл бұрын

you often describe it in hex due to the fact that its easier to read and you at the same time have an idea where the code is at, and basicly when you have 8 bits (a byte) you can devide them into 2 so called nibbles that represent til two 4 bit pairs that make up at byte in hex.

@big0ben209 11 жыл бұрын

This brings me back to my intro of computer science, we had to do binary math, fun times.

@jjhghost1272 3 жыл бұрын

hi person from 7 years ago

@tiagosr 11 жыл бұрын

And about the 256 options of each component, there are systems which use more information for each component of the pixel - workstations which do image processing and FX for movies and animation normally work with 2 bytes for each component, which gives 65536 variations for each. It so happens that the display tech that we use every day is not able to describe those variations precisely - most of the time even the 256 variations are beyond what is possible on an LCD screen, for example.

@ElNeroDiablo 11 жыл бұрын

Well, in Decimal/Base 10, your fingers (and thumbs) can only equal a max of (ten), whilst in Binary/Base 2, if a finger is curled or extended it represents other 0 (curled) or 1 (extended). Starting from the right thumb (palms facing you) as (one) and each digit position to the left doubling in value (eg: right index = 2 whilst right pinky = 16... left thumb = 512), you can reach 1023 which if you tried to add another 1 to it, it'd roll over to 1024 and you'd need an 11th digit to count it.

@Garou179 11 жыл бұрын

In JEDEC memory standards a kilobyte is a 1024 bytes, which is what is displayed on most system when looking at files on a cmd line or examining partition tables.

@ReadandWite 11 жыл бұрын

As to comments about different bases, mainframe programmers regularly use base 16 (hexidecimal or hex for short) since it makes interpreting the binary numbers much easier. Useful when asked your age, as stating it in hex can make you sound much younger. 48 decimal pronounced forty-eight = 30 hex pronounced three zero. However when 28 it doesn't work so well (1C).

@gothas 10 жыл бұрын

I have a question for our english natives here. Are there any rules for using nil, zero or nought or can you use them however you feel like?

@ianguibas7891 10 жыл бұрын

in binary numbers you mean? The rules are sort of dependent upon what you want to accomplish provided you are not misrepresenting your numbers. What I mean by that is that if you are looking to type the number 3 for example in binary, the most basic, shortest way to represent it is 11. If you do 011, it is still 3 though. Same if you were to do 0011. The difference is that once you do 110, it is not 3 anymore, it is instead 6. You can "sign-extend" binary when it is represented under a certain rule but the idea is that you can put as many 0s to the left of the number as you want, just not in between 1s or to the right of the number as this would change the actual value.For example 1101 (13 in base 10) is NOT the same as 11001 OR 11010, those 0s in between or after the 1s change the whole value of the number where as 000000000001101 is still the same number (13 in base 10). If you want to learn more about sign extension look up 2s compliment and IEE floating point binary, but fair warning these are sort of complex computer science things so it may not be the easiest thing to understand. They are on the lower end of the difficulty spectrum but can still be extremely difficult for some people nonetheless.

@TheManwithafan 11 жыл бұрын

Most of the Top Gear episodes and challenges are actually filmed during the break, they just air much later due to editing, and stuff like that.

@jonnyjackson6050 5 жыл бұрын

Its quips like that one about Ann Boleyn that make James May a hero.

@Zolbat 11 жыл бұрын

I am sorry for misspelling this word. A fuzz is a guitar effect that's really noisy, so in my mind it fitted well with the meaning of "fuss". I also want to point out, that english is not my first language, and I think you still got the point of what I was saying. Back to topic: It doesn't make much difference in every day use whether you send a file that's 1KB or 1KiB big, the other person gets a good idea about how big the file really is. If you need to be accurate though you just use Byte.

@sixtysixty6110 8 жыл бұрын

1 kilobyte is actually 1000 bytes, a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes etc. It used to be 1024 before the IEC decided to screw it up in 1998. Now, for 1024, we use binary prefixes (kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte etc) however, these aren't used very much.

@Xomsabre 7 жыл бұрын

Thank you for proving that I'm not the only person with this oft considered "worthless" knowledge....

@OfficialJamion 11 жыл бұрын

There is also base 16 also known as Hexadecimal. Counting 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F then 10. As well as Base 8 or Oct, which is occasionally used in CNC programming.

@Kaslai 11 жыл бұрын

This is a perfect example of what happens when a niche market explodes in to general use. Nobody really cared that the prefixes were used incorrectly until relatively recently. My guess is that kibi, mibi, etc prefixes came about after people who didn't know how computers are manufactured started complaining.

@nikolatotev 11 жыл бұрын

There's a question that has been in my head for a long time. How do processors work . Thank you. :) Ps. This is a great channel

@sou_1108 3 жыл бұрын

i dont know, but hi person from 7 years ago :D

@mrxd4068 3 жыл бұрын

7 yrs ago Wow

@vixveee 3 жыл бұрын

@@mrxd4068 exactly

@framephile6295 2 жыл бұрын

I hope you got the answer

@hennasasome1750 Жыл бұрын

hi geezer from 9 years ago

@szili76 11 жыл бұрын

Got to love James May!

@tiagosr 11 жыл бұрын

Also, there are systems which need less information to describe the colors available - most computers from the 90's used 2 bytes instead of 3 for each pixel, and each color component would occupy 5 or 6 bits of those bytes instead of 8 - this was the so-called Hi-Color (16-bit) graphics mode, as opposed to the True-Color (24-bit, or 3 bytes) mode.

@ElNeroDiablo 11 жыл бұрын

Also, the can't create/destroy only convert energy also applies to matter as well. The theory and science for converting matter to energy is somewhat decently known by now (eg: burn wood (matter) for heat (energy) for a campfire), but converting energy to matter is a bit more in the theoretical side of things at the moment.

@ElNeroDiablo 11 жыл бұрын

You're welcome. Counting in Binary is a trick my old Maths/Computer Science teacher back in high school taught me in one of the first CompSci classes I had back in Year 9 (that was back in 2002).

@Dragonion2010 11 жыл бұрын

Excellent explanation! :)

@Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time 11 жыл бұрын

Could we have computer based on binary digits or (bits) because everything is based on quantum mechanics? The two values 0/1 or bits can also be interpreted as logical values such as: true/false, yes/no, on/off or the signs (+/−) or any other two-valued states. Could this be because we have the wave particle duality of light with the probability of there being a wave or a particle?

@Overlord666fishy 11 жыл бұрын

I have a book called JPOD, and it has 28 A5 page worth of numbers, but where one 0 has been changed to an O. I have yet to find it.

@PuffinDragun69 11 жыл бұрын

How efficient is a internal combustion engine compared to an electric engine?

@HodsdenFilms 11 жыл бұрын

How do suction cups work? What makes them so strong?

@MissHystic 11 жыл бұрын

How to zip and rar files work? I was told that it works by changing binary into base 10, so that 10 becomes 2 and 11 becomes 3 etc, but I get the feeling that isn't possible because a computer can't store information any other way than 0 and 1

@BlakePulman 11 жыл бұрын

Exactly right. Glad I could help!

@Caldera01 11 жыл бұрын

1. The fact you don't count in some system is not mutually exclusive from not being able to. I have no idea what systems you can, or cannot count in. 2. Your point on "useless information" once again, is exactly the point I made originally. Thanks for finally understanding that. 3. Infinity exists only in theory, it is however a practical impossibility.

@HotshotTek 11 жыл бұрын

Why is the sky blue

@Xx_RidigonDragonNinja_xX Жыл бұрын

amazing video

@DemolitionTurtle 11 жыл бұрын

Great as always Lord May! ;D

@XenonFoxy 6 жыл бұрын

James may is the only one who can make boring things not boring 😂😂

@alerenesis 11 жыл бұрын

what about the dimmer switch?

@Noita_ 10 жыл бұрын

Subscribed before 60 seconds. Because this guy is epic. Thanks hahaha.

@UserNotReady 11 жыл бұрын

I'm happy to have helped.

@BlakePulman 11 жыл бұрын

Not quite. The number represented by the leading 1 is always (apart from 1 itself) a double of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. so, 100 is 4, 1000 is 8 and 1101 is 13. If you were to have, say, 1111, that is 15: 1 + 2 + 4 + 8. If you have a zero, it means you "skip" that value: so 1001 is 9 - the first 1 represents 8, the next two zeros represent 4 and 2, and the final 1 represents 1, so you have 1 + 8 = 9. Hope that helped :)

@fazhulkareem4336 3 жыл бұрын

can you tell about denary ms james

@BlazeFirereign 11 жыл бұрын

But the 'on/off' states (i.e. whether or not a current is flowing) are represented by 1 and 0, with 1 representing 'on', 0 representing 'off'. Representing binary numbers in text is far easier that way, rather than say, on-off-off-on instead of 1001.

@SkzCarteruwu 9 жыл бұрын

This Video is Helpful in different Ways.. Its kind of hard at First But Yeah. We Watched this at School with out own laptops.

@BaSs4cE11 11 жыл бұрын

that was a good explanation actually, thanks.

@zibbazabba905 11 жыл бұрын

in base "X", you never reach/see the number/letter/symbol for "X", base 2 never sees a 2, base 3, no 3's, base 9 no 9's. so what does a "10" look like?

@Pablo-V 11 жыл бұрын

3:38 lol

@malignantbassist 11 жыл бұрын

well, the Byzantines used our fingers to count in base 12. It's mostly the french revolution that has us counting in base 10. They (the Byzantine's) would use their right thumb to count the knuckles on the other 4 fingers of that same hand (i.e. up to 12). The left hand would count up to 5 the same way we would count to five with one hand. This way they could count up to 60 on their hands.

@tiagosr 11 жыл бұрын

An episode on that could become really long-winded, as there's a lot to explore on graphics and displays. About red being distinguishable from green and blue, as a simplification, it's mostly a matter of construction - bytes in a specific region of memory in the system being interpreted as ordered sets of red, green and blue values for each pixel - and the ordering is decided when designing the system.

@MrBreezedevil 11 жыл бұрын

What happens when something shatters? Do bonds get broken? If yes, why is shattering clay or glass called a physical change?

@fea6791 9 жыл бұрын

In programming language zero is different from letter O right?

@sixtysixty6110 8 жыл бұрын

Yes. 0 is an integer (whole number) while O is a string or character.

@billysgeo 11 жыл бұрын

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't...

@tonttupc 11 жыл бұрын

James, please tell me that you can explain this without script too.

@Kredeidi 11 жыл бұрын

so, 01 is not a number? Or 01= 10? The second position means it is times 2, so 01 would be 2, however the first position would say it didn't ever go beyond 1

@TheRuuchanchannel 11 жыл бұрын

That was delightful thank you.

@The55five5 11 жыл бұрын

I'm trying to understand how binary works, does this mean that 5 is 100, 9 is 1000 and say 14 is 1101? So just as soon as you only have 1's you increase the number of digits?

@TheSingingMetalhead 11 жыл бұрын

So I was holding my iPad when you did the high 10 thing...

@The55five5 11 жыл бұрын

Thanks, that helped to make it clearer :)

@mtnkalash860 11 жыл бұрын

Hello Mr. May, Could you go into more depth about colors on computers, given the concept of computers just knowing 0 or 1. Obviously, red is not green or blue. I'd appreciate a more in-depth explanation though. And why are there 256 options of red, blue and green (individually)? Thanks.

@CustardInc 11 жыл бұрын

I was about to comment that someone fell asleep while they were writing the title... then I had an epiphany ;D

@McDuffington 11 жыл бұрын

Remember: Kilo is a well defined SI-prefix and means one thousand. Mega is also an SI-prefix which means one million. When you buy a hard drive which holds 1 Terrabytes of information it will hold 1000.000.000.000 bytes. Since computers do work in base 2 it might make more sense to think in factors of 1024. That is why most other operating systems will talk about Kibibytes, Mibibytes and so forth. One Kibibyte = 1024 bytes, One Kilobyte = 1000 bytes.

@KillingTheMotivation 11 жыл бұрын

Binary is just the way computers count due to a voltage charge in the magnets(which can only be on or off). For counting numbers the first digit is 2 to the power of +1(of the last power), for example; 1101101 would equal 2^5 + 2^4 + 0 + 2^3 + 2^2 + 0 + 2^1, so 64 + 32 + 0 + 8 + 4 + 0 + 1(any number to the power of zero equals 1) which in total equals 109 as a decimal number. Really it's counted the same as base ten because every extra digit is 10 to power of an increasing value of 1.

@babygoat8582 10 жыл бұрын

best binary explanation I've seen

@markvanepps2276 11 жыл бұрын

So if 3=11 because you got to 2 once and added 1, would 4=20 because you got to 2 twice?

@robly17 11 жыл бұрын

Actually, 1KB=1024B The kilobyte (symbol: kB) is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. "Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol kB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 (210) bytes or 1000 (103) bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information technology." Taken from the Wikipedia.

@MikeyR0101 11 жыл бұрын

01 is just 1, just like in base 10, if you have a 0 at the start, you can ignore it and it won't change anything.

@20thCstudio 11 жыл бұрын

you missed the opportunity to explain the 2's complement rule and how a computer does subtraction through doing an addition.

@rdgale2000 11 жыл бұрын

Using base 10, counting on your hands you can only count to - well, 10. In Base 2 you can count from 0 to 31 - or 32 values. Not too bad. But watch out for the numbers 4 and 20 - they can be rather rude.

@zgb116 11 жыл бұрын

A gigabyte actually is a billion bytes. A GiB (Gibybyte) is what he was explaining. This is why when you plug in your flash drive in a Windows box, you see your hardrive has significantly less space than advertised. Windows measures size in GiB, MiB, and KiB. When you plug the same hard drive in to a Unix box (such as Mac, Ubuntu or any Linux distro) you see the exact same space as advertised (except for maybe some partition errors and pre copied files).

@yousorooo 11 жыл бұрын

Base 2 lol. Why didn't you talk about Base64 encoding instead?

@Charlie2531games 11 жыл бұрын

No. When a computer subtracts numbers, one of the things it has to to is to make one number negative, which involves inverting every bit. (changing 1s to 0s, and 0s to 1s). Supposing that "11111101" is a signed byte (making it -2), then the additional "-" at the beginning would make it positive, thus inverting it and making it equal to 2.

@IAmTheBestHumanEver 10 жыл бұрын

*_I think_* that they are related to canaries in that they rhyme and that's all I know about binary numbers. *But I am a fan of James May, he's a real hoot!*

@billysgeo 11 жыл бұрын

Damn, I posted that before I got to the end of the video!!! LOL

@tubastud06 11 жыл бұрын

What James could have done is explain why the digit to the left is a "2" and so forth. There are 8 bits in a byte and each of those bits represent a number value. Starting from the left they are128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1. So the number 4 could technically be represented as 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0. We can use binary "short hand" and just say 1 0 0.

@connormcreynolds6116 11 жыл бұрын

Can't wait for the next season of top gear

@BariumCobaltNitrog3n 11 жыл бұрын

But everyone uses O as a number, like highway one oh one. You wouldn't say highway one zero one. Or agent double oh seven sounds odd as agent double zero seven. Mustang five point oh or five point zero?

@MrMusicDimi 11 жыл бұрын

I have a Question: In the Movie "2012" we were told, that the Magnetic field of the Earth has changed polarization over time. I wanted to know,what exactly happens when such a thing occurs. I meen, we got a glimpse of it in the movie, but I dont think that this was quite accurate. Ps. Great show!

@martyg565 11 жыл бұрын

I made a song the other day using binary code. I actually spelt my name as a barcode, because it's the right amount of characters long. Surprisingly, it got good feedback!

@henankan 11 жыл бұрын

Yay at last, something I learned in school has proven to be of value

@BlackMagixFTW 11 жыл бұрын

Great Video:D!!!!!

@Taino21 11 жыл бұрын

Just some new fresh out looks and new discussions or topics, is all I'm saying. I'm not giving up on you. Or this channel, just venting I guess.

@SauberC10 11 жыл бұрын

So this is episode 28?

@KillingTheMotivation 11 жыл бұрын

00 = 0, (01 = 1), 10 = 2, 11 = 3, 100 = 4, 101 = 5, 110 = 6, 111 = 7, 1000 = 8 Etcetera... If we wanted to get the number 10 (as a decimal number) it would be 1010 in Binary, this is because it's 2 to the power of 3 (which equals 8) plus 2 to the power of 1 (Which equals 2) which in total equals 10.

@antiHUMANDesigns 11 жыл бұрын

The babylonians used base 12, I think. They counted on the 3 joints of each finger on one had. (4x3=12). And base 12 is better than base 10, because you can divide 12 in more ways than you can divide 10. That's also why we have, for example, 12 hours, 60 minutes (120/2), and 360 degrees (120*3). At least that's what I've heard. :P But it makes perfect sense. It's a shame we got stuck with base 10.

@billyjack70 11 жыл бұрын

I don't think anyone knows. Obviously it isn't catastrophic to life. However, the magnetic flux and possible momentary lapse in field could cause a lot of issues for electronics and power systems as well as excess particles from the sun that are otherwise deflected.

@Tullerion 11 жыл бұрын

i learnt binary waaaay back in grade 7 it's a pretty awesome way of writing in code that you don't want others to read ;D

@billybigdinners7407 7 жыл бұрын

Q. What goes "Owt Nowt Owt Owt Owt Nowt Owt?" . A digital Yorkshireman.

@UserNotReady 11 жыл бұрын

Instead of 5, 9, and 14, you wrote the binary for 4, 8, and 13. It's all about place values of each digit. Starting from the right, the first digit has a place value of 1. The second has a place value of 2, third has a place value of 4, the fifth has 8, etc. Google image search "binary place value chart" for some examples of what I mean. 0 = 0000 1 = 0001 2 = 0010 3 = 0011 4 = 0100 5 = 0101 6 = 0110 7 = 0111 8 = 1000 9 = 1001 10 = 1010 11 = 1011 12 = 1100 13 = 1101 14 = 1110 15 = 1111