Binary

Computers are stupid.

I know, I know. "Why would someone whose only source of income depends on computers call them stupid?" Well, if it weren't for stupid people, I wouldn't have a job either. If it weren't for stupid people, the only people calling tech support would be asking questions like, "What are your DNS numbers?" and "What's your dial-up number?" Instead, we get stuff like, "What's an icon?" and "I can't get the internet to work!" (is your modem plugged into the computer?) "What modem?" And my income also depends on my boss, and . . . Well, maybe I shouldn't get into that.

So I say again. Computers are stupid. Because they are. They're binary. At a base level, all computers are exactly the same. (I'm probably pissing off everyone with that comment, with the Mac users screaming, "How dare you say my Mac is anything like those awful PCs?" and the PC users crying, "How dare you say my PC is anything like those awful Macs?" Well, at least they can agree on something.) Computers understand only two things: yes and no. Some may understand them faster than others, but the bottom line is that those are the only two things any computer knows. The programmers are the smart ones. They're the ones who tell the computer what to do with what combination of yesses and nos.

Even something as complex as colors are expressed in forms of yesses and nos. A bit is one yes/no switch. 1-bit color would be either 1 or 0; either black or white. 2-bit has four choices: 11, 10, 01, and 00. 3-bit has eight choices, and so on. 8-bit has 256 choices. Aha, that's where 8- 16- 24- and 32-bit color comes from, and if you want to find out exactly how many colors that is, get your calculator out and calculate 2 to the whatever power. 32-bit color has 4,292,967,296 choices ranging, in binary, from 00000000000000000000000000000000 to 11111111111111111111111111111111.

They're binary.

People aren't like that.

There is more to the world than black and white. There are shades in between. Some people are white, some are black, some are brown, yellow, red... there's no definitive either way. Most people understand that much. What some people don't understand is that it applies to a lot more than just skin color. Sexuality isn't binary. There are heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals, but they're all blended into each other into different levels of them. Some people are only attracted to men, some are only attracted to women, and some are attracted to both at varying degrees. It's not binary.

Gender isn't even binary. We have men, and we have women, right? Wrong. We have men who feel like women and some live as women and some have operations to become women and some wish they were women and some just dress in their wives' underwear when they think no one is looking. Same goes both ways. And then there are the identities within the gender. There are butch lesbians and femme lesbians, right? No, there's butch, soft butch, femme, people like me who are femme but hate makeup, people who look one way and act the other... it's all a big fuzzy grey area. It's not binary.

We do NOT live in a binary world.