Here's a guy lip-synching to an old Tom Lehrer song:



(When I first heard the song, I thought it was Robert Preston doing a Music-Man style patter song. Preston's and Lehrer's voices are somewhat similar. Also the tune is slightly reminiscent of "Trouble in River City.")

The funny thing? Once he gets past that "here's how you do it if you're under 35..." stuff, it makes total sense to me. Especially the base 8 stuff.

I went to school in the 70s, when doing base-changing was big. I suppose it was some kind of preparation for our Imagined New Computer Overlords that never materialized. But understanding binary and hexadecimal and base-8 is among the comparatively useless things that I'm inordinately proud of.

Another semi-useless math thing I learned? Set theory. Yeah, I'm kind of the Mistress of Venn Diagrams. The problem is, in my research life, there's not much of a call for 'em. (I do teach them in my stats class; half the class get them immediately and the other half is usually "Baroo?" for a few days until I admit that they will probably never actually need to DO a Venn diagram.)

I like math. That is actually kind of surprising to me because I claimed to hate it when I was in grade school. But I'm actually pretty good at it, and it does kind of appeal to the pattern-seeking part of my brain.