Off Topic: Governor General's Coat of Arms has a binary stream [was: OT-GG binary]

[Peter]

Thomas Milne <tbrucemilne at ...> writes:
> predates computers by hundreds of years. Binary was 'invented' by
> mathematicians in India and China, IIRC, about a thousand years ago.

Well the Romans used biquinal abacii. And they were not new when they started
using them apparently. Biquinal means base-2-and-base-5 which is actually
clever, you only have one free hand to check things off on fingers while holding
an abacus in the other. Of course 2 came from having 2 hands in total (used 1 at
a time). Later 2*5 became our current base 10. Apparently biquinal is tightly
connected to Roman numbers, the numbers from 1 to 10 clearly reflect this,
including the built-in shorthand notation (IIX = 8 instead of VIII etc).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus

According to this calculus may have meant 'playing with pebbles' to someone way
back then...

-- Peter

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