Word: digit
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Numbers for Words. Binary notation uses only two digits. 1 (yes) and 0 (no). Each digit tells whether a given power of 2 is part of the number with which the computer is dealing (see diagram). Numerical information, such as figures from a payroll, can be easily translated into binary notation for storage in a computer's memory. Written English requires another step. Each letter of the alphabet, for example, might be assigned a decimal number (A=l, B = 2, C = 3, etc.). Whole words would be translated into decimal numbers, and the decimal numbers, in turn, translated into...
...more than a century of its existence, what has become the world's best-known address was not No. 10 Downing Street: it was No. 5. Only during one of its many restorations did the simple Georgian town house in London somehow double its digit. Under any number, it never seemed to foreigners to be pretentious enough for the hub of the British Empire. But most Englishmen insist that it be kept just the way it always has been...
...telephone company has bagged its biggest trophy. At 12:01 last Saturday, President Lyndon Johnson's NAtional 8-1414 phone number at the White House was changed clickety-zip to 456-1414. Said an anti-digit dialing partisan bitterly: "Prestigewise...
...TELEPHONES could once be activated by merely speaking the number with eyes closed, then had to be worked by coordinating eye and forefinger, and now, with the advent of all-digit dialing, demand intellectual concentration as well. But wait. A device called Dial-A-Word has come to the rescue. A plastic disk that slips over a dial gives a choice of two consonants for every number, which can then be combined with vowels (which are placed so that they don't register) to translate any combination of digits into an easily remembered phrase. Thus the number...
...fingers. With eight fingers, he might have invented a base-eight number system. Many children now explore the base-two (binary) system, used in computers, which depends only on 0 and 1 . They alarm parents with the news, for example, that seven is not 7 but 111, each digit is twice the one to the right: one 4, one 2, one 1, adding up to 7, each digit is twice the one to the right; one 4, one 2, one 1, adding up to 7. Similarly, 5 is 101 (one 4, no 2s, one 1). Once they are well grounded...