All hail mighty toaster-makers

NUMBERS GAME: Getting to grips with binary ... start them young.A-150115HOSDSSCHOOL6

IN THE circumstances, I feel quite extraordinarily well. I have just become 1,000,000 years old and I certainly propose to raise a glass to celebrate the occasion.

Well, by now some of you will be wondering about the standards of the Chronicle editorial staff. Is there a decimal point missing, perhaps? Should it really say 10 years old and will the glass be full of Ribena or one of those alco pops which the less scrupulous in the drinks industry use to lure the young into their rapacious clutches?

Yes, that would make sense - you've always thought that there was something infantile about the views from London. That's it. They are written by an infant.

But, then again, isn't he married to a Wanganui local? Even in England you don't get married at 9 if you live inside the M25.

Perhaps it should say 100, then. That makes more sense. In China, you are just ready for political power at that age - to someone with Chinese genes, writing for the Chronicle at 100 would be a bagatelle.

Actually, though, the Chronicle isn't to blame at all. It is just that you have assumed that the number is written to the usual base 10 rather than in binary, where 1,000,000 is actually 64.

Now if there is one thing worse than having to read election post mortems - and I can tell you we've all had a bellyful of that over here - it's a maths lesson over the cornflakes, so I'll keep it short.

If you were to multiply six 10s together and wanted to express the amount in the normal way - in which the last digit represents units, the next digit to the left shows the number of 10s, the next digit is hundreds etc, you would NOT write it 1 0 0 0 0 0 0.

But in binary, the right digit is units, the next digit is twos, the next one fours, the next one eights, then 16s, 32s, 64s - so 64 is shown by a 1 in the seventh column. Hence 1 0 0 0 0 0 0. Got it?

If you have, you are probably good enough to get a maths degree from Oxford. If not, maybe you had better ask the kids.

The thing about binary is that it is really rather important. That is not just because it makes you seem older and wiser than you are - most people get suspicious when you claim to be over 1000 - but because computers translate numbers into binary before processing them.

That means your laptop and mobile phone become full of binary numbers in much the same way as an open jar of honey becomes full of ants. A failure to understand binary, therefore, means a failure to understand computing and mobile phones and just about everything we use day to day.

Even if you do understand binary, you probably don't understand microprocessors or lasers, so your position is much the same. In the end, all of us - a few eggheads excluded - are like the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy character who, when he fell among primitive people, realised that "left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich, and that was it."

We have moved a long way from the 18th century when Doctor Johnson reputedly knew everything worth knowing. Now few of us understand the instruments we use and, as these become more complex, that pool gradually shrinks.

That is an unstable situation. What when there are only 10 people left who understand? Suppose a terrorist wiped them out? How much should they be paid?

If all the distribution systems depend on their expertise so that we starve if they stop working, we really need to keep on the right side of them. Should they be a new ruling class?

Perhaps Ned Ludd had it right. Perhaps we should not let the drive for efficiency make us more dependent on difficult science. After all, the end of this road is that everything is done by robots and switches and that the human race gets fatter, lazier and slower. It isn't a very cheerful prospect.

-John Watson writes from Islington in London.