For many years now, certainly since I was about twelve years old, I have counted by twos in my head. It’s something I do without really thinking, so second nature that I don’t generally notice that I am doing it, like an earworm that one has lived with for decades.<\/p>\n
I only count up to the first twenty powers of two, and for some reason I have no interest in anything beyond that. Maybe something in my mind just wants to get up to a million, and then says “Ok, that’s enough.”<\/p>\n
It’s always the same sequence of course: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144, 512288, 1048576.<\/p>\n
I think this may be something my mind does to reduce anxiety. If I am stuck on a subway, or waiting at an appointment for someone who is late, I will find myself running up the powers of two.<\/p>\n
That’s only a theory — I really don’t know for sure why my mind does this. But I can say from experience that it is quite relaxing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For many years now, certainly since I was about twelve years old, I have counted by twos in my head. It’s something I do without really thinking, so second nature that I don’t generally notice that I am doing it, like an earworm that one has lived with for decades. I only count up to … Continue reading “Counting by twos”<\/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\/16195"}],"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=16195"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16197,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16195\/revisions\/16197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}