layout: post
title: "10 Kinds of People"
subtitle: "... and some 7 billion more kinds."

We've all read the joke.

> There are 10 types of people in the world... Those who understand
> binary and those who don't."

Or the one people who pride themselves to be a bit more nerdy than the
nerdy ones prefer:

> There are 10 types of people in the world ... Those who understand
> hexadecimal and 15 others."

There's even a quote about this on [bash.org](http://bash.org/?top).

> kow: "There are 10 types of people in the world... those who
> understand binary and those who don't."

> SpaceRain: That's only 2 types of people, kow.

> SpaceRain: STUPID

I'll tell you; this SpaceRain dude has a point.

In fact, I'd say:

### There are 10 types of people in the world... Those who doesn't know how to communicate a number base properly, and nine types who do.

As [xkcd](http://xkcd.com/169/) put it:

> Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is
> not cleverness.

Of course, "In base 2 there are 10 types of people in the world..."
isn't very funny, but - in all fairness - the original joke isn't very
funny anymore either. However, "There are 010 types of people in the
world... Those who can use google to look up octal numbering conventions
and 7 others", is a bit funny to my fancy, even if it's a very strange
way of classifying people.

Maybe we all should just move on from this joke or at least bring it to
the next level.

I'll end this with a version that is actually funny and which I regret
to say I will probably never find the original source of.

> "There are 2 types of people in the world... Those who can extrapolate
> from incomplete data"

Also, I recently added commenting to the blog posts. Please, fill me in
on your versions.
