Friday, May 15

I woke at 4am and could not get back to sleep, so I decided to do a mental exercise and tire myself. I thought about hexadecimal again, and decided that this time I would convert 1,000 into hexadecimal.

This involved reviewing my strategy (based on knowing that 100 hex turns into 256 decimal) and then revising my technique for converting 2020 into hex. The new technique proved much easier. It went like this:

100 hex = 256 decimal.
800 hex = 2048 decimal.
Take away 32 decimal and you find that 7e0 hex = 2016.
Add 4 decimal and you find that 7e4 = 2020.

Equipped with this technique, it took me less than a minute to decide that 1000 decimal converts to 3e8 hex. I then decided that to complete the exercise I needed to commit to memory the fact that a, c, and e count as even numbers while b, d, and f constitute odd numbers, and went straight back to sleep.

We wake up at 7:30 to a world covered in overnight snow that the bright sun has already started melting. As I leave for a walk I have to dodge the water dropping from the trees like localised rainfall.

I stop to photograph the strong, long morning shadows in the driveway. I catch my own feet which add some contrast to the palette.

I will spend most of the day in the continuing process of interviewing potential students on Zoom, with Jutta and Mirko. The system we devised will continue to work perfectly, and prove once again to tell us more than the face-to-face interviews used to.