“There are 10 types of people in this world…”

Item:

“There are 10 types of people in the world… those who understand binary and those who don’t.”

General Information about Item:

  • Oral Folklore: joke
  • English/binary
  • USA
  • Collector: , Agastya Gupta

Informant Data:

Tim Tregubov is a 37 year old white male Dartmouth computer science professor who grew up in the Upper Valley and whose family is from Russia.

Weiling Huang is a 19 year old in the Dartmouth Class of 2019, majoring in Government. He has taken some classes in Computer Science.

Contextual Data:

The joke is that “One Zero” is the number 2 in binary, but also reads like ten. So, if you aren’t familiar with binary, you wouldn’t know.

Tim first heard this joke last night from a student in the DALI Lab at Dartmouth. He thinks it would be a relevant joke to tell “when hanging out with nerds,” as they are the only ones who would understand it.

Weiling heard this joke told by his professor in a Computer  Science class here at Dartmouth College. He mentions that he has not used it outside of that context.

Transcript of Associated File:

Tim’s Interview

Weiling’s Interview:

Informant’s Comments:

A similar piece of folklore Tim had encountered was that the prerequisite for the course ENGS 31 (Digital Electronics) is being able to count from 0 to 1, as that class relies on binary where everything is a zero or one. In terms of how the joke works with group of people, it is “basically saying there are people who get it and people who don’t. It’s an in joke, and in a way, programming is like that… there’s a few movements about democratizing software development, but every time a developer builds new tools, they’re always hard to use… And it wouldn’t be a high paying job if it was easy for anyone to do. It creates a sense of ‘in-ness’, where I get it and other people don’t.”

Collector’s Comments:

This joke is a piece of verbal folklore – more specifically a riddle. It uses the similarity between representing the number 10 in decimal format and the number 2 in binary format to trick the person who is reading or hearing it.

Tags/Keywords:

  • binary, joke

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