You Are My All in All

This hymn called "You are My All in All" is my latest post on Tea with Liya today. While the music is pleasing to listen to, it's also important to remember the message of the song as well. I hope you enjoy listening to this song! Even if you didn't, it's only 7 days till another one....


Listen to the song here
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Today, I thought of a little something I could say about numbers.

Augh, numbers? I already have enough of those once you put together my calculus and chemistry courses. Plus, you were just talking about palindromic numbers a couple weeks ago. If similar words are going through your head, let me inform you that those numbers will someday prove themselves much more important than you think they are right now.

To make it even easier on your already stressed brain, I don't have much more to say than a couple things about counting.

As you know already, we use 10 digits for counting. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9! Because of that, we'd say that our number system is "base 10."

Meanwhile, computers use binary (base 2) numbers, which only have 2 digits: 0 and 1. Because each unit place only has two states, the numbers are easier for computers to process. Either there is an electrical current, or there isn't - differing amounts of current wouldn't cause a number to be misrepresented.

You can have any number of digits you want - 8, 16, 3, or even 7 (although I haven't heard of anything that uses that one).

Have you noticed the problem with how I'm defining these number systems?

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Take a look at what I just said. "You can have any number of digits you want - 8, 16, 3, or even 7...."

Let's say you did count with 7 digits. Then, you'd count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11.... 16, 20, 21.... 26, 30.....

You would then say, "My number system has 10 digits. Yours, on the other hand, has 13. I've never heard of anyone that counts with 13 digits."

If you counted in binary, you'd count 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000...... Therefore, your number system would also have 10 digits - from your perspective, that is. You'd say that I counted with 1,010 digits - which obviously doesn't make sense when I look at it!

You get to decide what 10 is for you. You've just got to come up with enough digits to fill in the space before it.

As you can see, we often look at things from our perspective and don't realize what they look like to others. Maybe you count with "10" digits, but to someone else, you count with 13 digits (and since they feel like 13 is an unlucky number, you're creating divisions because of the way you count). Sometimes, all it takes is to look at the issue from a different point of view in order to realize what the real problem is.

Hopefully that's one thing you'll remember for the week ahead. Don't forget the numbers and how they look different to different people. It's just like trying to determine what speed you're moving at or which way is down.

Maybe you've resolved to never listen to me talk about counting again, but why not keep counting... and keep filling your teacup with music?

~Liya