When I was a kid I remember being completely fascinated by binary arithmetic, from the very first moment I found out about it. I think at first I saw it as a secret source of power.<\/p>\n
I had already been into cyphers, letter substitution codes, and that sort of thing. I remember when I was about eleven years old I wrote a letter in invisible ink, mostly made from lemon juice. The writing was completely invisible until you held it above a candle (cue spooky music here), at which point it would slowly reveal itself.<\/p>\n
But binary numbers were something more. In a way they were a personal evolution for me, a transition from “I can do something nobody else can”, to “I can do something amazingly powerful and beautiful.”<\/p>\n
I think it was the “beautiful” part that changed everything. The fact that I could use such a simple and elegant system to represent and combine numbers (a much more elegant system than our own base 10, I might add), was perhaps the first real tug at my heart strings toward the beauty of mathematics.<\/p>\n
Now here I am, all these years later, programming computers every day, creating art with math, and having a hell of a time. All because of some ones and zeros. I don’t regret any of it — not one bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a kid I remember being completely fascinated by binary arithmetic, from the very first moment I found out about it. I think at first I saw it as a secret source of power. I had already been into cyphers, letter substitution codes, and that sort of thing. I remember when I was … Continue reading “Bits of inspiration”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13259"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13260,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13259\/revisions\/13260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}