The Month of Love

Well, now we enter the month of February, when the theme is about love and chocolates and caring and soft and fuzzy things. Unfortunately, that's not the case about computers... or more like math and art for today.

Yesterday, I started on my research folder. Just a heads up about it because it's due next next Tuesday.

What I learned today is the hexadeximal system. It's sort of like the binary code or even our regular tens system. It's really easy once you know it. Instead of using ten's or two's, we use sixteen. With 1 and 16, you can show the different 255 colours that a computer is capable of showing. Let me explain it further.

Okay. In binary we use numbers and multiply them by two. So our place values would be: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64... However, in the hexadecimal system, our place values is by 16. So, it would start with 1, 16, then 266... and so on. Now, our computer screens are capable of producing 255 levels of each of the colours red, green or blue. We only use the place values 1 and 16 because 266 is one more than 255. But since numbers can only go up until 9 before having a place value added, we use letters instead of numbers.

So A= 10
B= 11
C=12
D=13
E=14
F=15

Let's say we want the number 53 to be translated in the hexadecimal system. Its code would then be 35. This is because it would take 3 16's and 5 1's to make 35. Just check. 3 x 16 = 48. and 1 x 5 is obviously 5. 48 + 5 is equal to 53. That's just basically how it works. There are 255 different combinations for the three colours using only those two numbers and six letters.