Jim Moskowitz

The. Best. Bad. Pun.

2008-05-29T15:04:51Z

I woke up this morning, from a dream involving Gene Klotz giving a lecture about the 'net to a gargantuan auditorium, with what may be the best pun ever running through my head. I have no idea why the muse has decided to vouchsafe me with this pearl, but I feel it only proper to pass it on to you for safekeeping.

It was a description of a wiki site that was seriously underutilized, both in not containing much information and in rarely having anyone update it. It was indisputably a weenie, weedy wiki.

Amazingly, google indicates that only two other people have come up with this, and one of them didn't seem to realize it was a pun.

So what else is old?

2008-05-18T23:16:16Z

I had always thought the phrase "Democrat Party" was a recent development, possibly Frank "Winning through Implication" Luntz's attempt to give Republicans a way to blunt the goodwill associated with the word 'democratic'.
But I just watched on C-SPAN an excerpt from Ronald Reagan's speech at the 1976 Republican Convention, after Ford had gotten the nomination and he clearly mentioned the danger of "the erosion of freedom under Democrat rule". Turns out (sayeth wikipedia) the 21st-century popularity of the term among Republicans is just a flare-up of something that dates back to the 19th century, and which was favored by both Hoover and McCarthy.
I wonder what other phrases that I've always thought werre modern actually date back a century?

The Jones soda has been aerosolized

2008-05-08T23:14:34Z

I was carrying a bunch of bags in from the PhillyShareCar, which I'd used to go shopping for both groceries and workshop materials, including a wading pool, modeling clay, clothespins, and fun noodles (which is another story, one that's getting detailed in this month's SWAPA). I had to get out my keys, so I set one of the bags down on the concrete, and it started hissing. I didn't want to investigate right then because I had the car stopped in the middle of the parking lot, flashers on, so I hurried up to my apartment. After I put away the refrigeratables, I investigated the still-hissing bag. It was, as I'd suspected, one of the cans of Jones Soda. As I took it out from the bag the room instantly started smelling sweet. The can was about 2/3rds full, and the very tiny hole that had been made in its side was continuing to vent strawberry-lime stickiness in a cloud, powered by the carbonation and all the jostling. I quickly opened the can--which took off the pressure and ended the spraying--and poured it into a glass, then quickly returned the car. I managed to get soda sprayed all over my face and glasses as I picked the can up, so it's off to the shower. But I wanted to share the story first :^)

somewhat averted

2008-03-02T05:05:15Z

Tonight Psi Phi held a board gaming in Parlors. I went, since it was the first one of the semester (aside from inauguration, which I couldn't make). When I arrived people were still waiting to see how many would come. So we spent 15 minutes playing Miles' cool variant of Class Struggle/Dalmuti/whatyouwill. Then we decided to start playing real boardgames, and various people described what they'd brought (I had Modern Art, Evo, and Carcassonne). There was uncertainty and dithering for five minutes, then someone made a push for critical mass to play Risk-2150. Five people headed off to that, and immediately the remaining four said "let's play Magic" and peeled off to another corner of parlors and started playing. I just sat there by myself for a minute, as everyone else started setting up, feeling ignored. I got on my coat and said I'd head off.

Miles gave a sympathetic look, which made me pause and come over to his game, and then my unhappiness was averted, because I suggested to them that I might play a two player game with someone while four played Risk-2150. Orion agreed, and we played Polarity, which I'd only ever heard about - it's a skill game involving disc magnets which you try to position on a board so that they're not lying flat, but lean on a diagonal in the air, held up by the other magnets already on the board. It's tricky but pretty fun and very cool looking. It took 20 minutes, by which time two people I didn't know had come in and gotten interested in gaming, so we four played Chrononauts.

After that Orion took over for the departing Jamison in Risk, and Annie arrived, so I put off leaving long enough to play a couple of games of Lost Cities. I'm glad gaming happened, and I'm even glad I went, but it was a close call.

A rebuttal to xkcd

2008-02-26T07:06:57Z

And here's my Do-It-Yourself version for anyone else with opinions and Photoshop.

Game idea: The Wiki Races

2008-01-24T14:32:23Z

Can anybody give me suggestions, and perhaps volunteer for a playtesting session, of a game/pastime/contest that I thought of which I'm calling "The Wiki Races" in honor of a cherished kids TV show?

At its heart, the game is about trying to get from a given starting page on Wikipedia to a target page as fast as possible, solely by clicking links in the body of the article (nothing in the sidebar or footer). I'm thinking that "fast" in the sense of "fewest clicks" is more conducive to a good game than "least elapsed seconds", although there'd have to be some time involved to determine when a round ends, since it's hard to be certain that a shorter path might be found given enough effort. So I'd do the Ricochet Robots mechanic: players all start simultaneously; when one player has found a path they may call out "got it in [n]!" Everyone (that player too) has one minute more to look, and call out "got it in [m]!" Whoever's called out the lowest number proves they have in fact found a path in that many clicks, and if so wins the round.

I like the game because it rewards an interesting ability: to broadly think about ways that various subjects might be linked, and what intermediary connections might exist. For example, I get from

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington

in seven steps, via geography: I start by linking to Spanish, then Spain, then Spanish colonization, then Great Plains, United States, Washington DC, and Washington (going back while writing this email I see there was a much faster shortcut).

I figure first person to 12-divided-by-number-of-players wins.

What do you think?

First parlorgaming of the year

2007-09-18T02:10:34Z

Tonight's parlorgaming was ne plus perfecto. It was announced on the new Fun list (by me) and at Psi Phi (I don't know who by since I couldn't make the meeting) as being from 7 - 9 tonight. I got there at 7 and didn't see anyone at first, then ran in to Rhiannon (sp?) the frosh, who was over in the lounge. We waited in the east parlor, afraid at first that nobody else was coming. To pass the time we played the bet-your-points-to-move-the-penny-toward-your-goal game, which was just finishing when people arrived, all within about five minutes: Eric, Erin, Herbert, Michael, Rebecca G., and Will. We Pavloved for an hour (including getting Herbert to open all the curtains in the parlor (including the one she inadvertently tore down the curtain rod of :^) and totally confusing Erin when trying to get her to put her palms together - she became fixed on this bubblewrap-padded envelope, convinced we had clapped because she had (with both hands) picked it up. She did many things to it including jumping up and down on it triumphantly).

Then we had one of the most fun games of telephone oracle I've been in, a bit of which will be in SWAPA. Let me just say that a handwritten "S&M" should get mistaken for "gum" more often. The results are hilarious. Annie arrived near the end, bringing the student:alum ratio to 1:1 which is lower than I was hoping for, but if word of this parlorgaming's niftiness spreads hopefully there'll be more interest in the next one.

I completely love how silly the dreaming brain can be

2007-08-20T22:09:58Z

I woke up this morning with a vivid memory of having discovered a great dictionary entry for the next time I get to run a round of email fictionary: there's a second definition of the term 'orbital mechanics' that's totally unrelated to the astronomical first meaning; I would have the contestants create plausible second definitions, and see if they could determine the true one. Which is, according to the lower-right-hand page of the dictionary I saw in dreams around 8:30a.m., an ornamental method of cooking and displaying chicken.

In other news, I'm back from a week in Louisiana with eight other SWILums, doing work in the heat for some state parks and a wetland-plant farm -- but less work than I'd expected on a service vacation, as you've probably already read about in others' postings. I managed to sprain my ankle four days before leaving, effect an emergency crash cure by completely keeping off it for 60 hours, and got it in good enough shape to work on it, gingerly the first day but increasingly vigorously as days went by.

Oh, and I wanted to show off my new lj icon.

eclectic_boy @ 2007-07-16T20:28:00

2007-07-17T00:31:05Z

Quick update on the suitcase front: It was finally delivered to me 72 hours after my flight landed, on Friday afternoon (the person who handed it to me made sure I knew that he and the driver surely do appreciate any tips or gratuities I was willing to offer them). I had just enough time to grab things from it and head on a bus up to NYC for Kyra's farewell storyreading, and had a lovely time. It doesn't make up for three wasted days of waiting, but maybe my nastygram to USAirways will get me some recompensation....

Another beautiful day spent trapped indoors

2007-07-13T15:31:15Z

It's 79 degrees, sunny, and low humidity outside. I know this because Wunderground tells me, and because I feel it at my window. But I can't go out and enjoy it because, for a second straight day, I'm sitting waiting for a truck from USAirways baggage services to come and return my suitcase to me. I flew back from Boston on Tuesday, and my luggage wasn't there when I arrived. Since then I've heard a half-dozen different explanations: that it's on it's way, that they don't know where it is, that they can't find Greylock, that they realized they were bringing me the wrong suitcase, that it's already been delivered to me...

I'm ready to scream, and what I would scream is "USAirways sucks". Exacerbating the frustration, they also lost my luggage on the flight *up* to Boston last week, though that time I had it back in a few hours. I've never had a baggage problem before, in maybe a dozen flights with them, and I have lots of frequent flier miles with them so I'm not switching to a new airline until I get enough miles for another free flight and take it... but I'm sure going to try avoiding checking my luggage from now on. Time to buy some less-than-three-ounce containers of toiletries.

eclectic_boy @ 2007-04-28T01:07:00

2007-04-28T05:24:37Z

Tonight Herbert, Eric, Michael G. and I went to Nifty Fifties and then played Settlers (Michael's first game. Amazingly, the beginner didn't win :^) amid discussions of geiger counters, Orson Scott Card, foreign words for odd things, and suchlike.

We discovered that (Noda's) Settlers set is missing things - the white pieces and the circles for numbering each hex. I made crude substitutes out of paper (which are in the set now, Noda, in case you need to keep using them -- but I hope you know where the actual pieces have got to). It was a nicely silly evening, and a good if slow and 7-overfilled game, and just a wonderfully sweet respite from worries about the future of SWIL/"???", a reminder of how much I love it when people come together around creative play. So thank you!

Out of the past, and into the woods

2007-04-13T02:26:58Z

My too-busy day included setting up the stage for an orchestra rehearsal I couldn't attend, hopping a train into Philadelphia to do the Liquid Nitrogen demonstration at the Franklin Institute for the first time in... six years?.... heading back to strike the stage, and going to the opening night of Into the Woods.

I got kind of nervous about doing this demo, which I semispontaneously decided to do a couple of days ago (I've started a consulting project for the Institute, teaching the demo, the current script for which I wrote) -- nervous enough that I had trouble getting to sleep last night and had it appear in my dreams. Of course it wasn't unfamiliar material, but would I remember the flow, the words, the stage manner.... and I was ecstatic that the answers to all three were yes. A bit rusty, and a little too explanation-heavy (partly from not remembering where to make which points and partly because four trainees were in the audience and I wanted them to see as much as possible, especially of the scientific explanations, since most of them have theatrical backgrounds and tend to focus on that instead of on information), but definitely presentable, and well-received (I'm very fond of audience approval :^)

I also want to thank everyone who came to the SWIL talent show; that turned out to be my warm-up.

Getting to watch Into the Woods in LPAC made a spectacular reward. It's Sondheim, which guarantees interesting plots and intricate lyrics -- and vice versa; I at least liked all the players and loved the Witch, Cinderella's Prince and the Mysterious Man In The Woods. If you're unfamiliar with it, Sondheim weaves a whole bunch of fairy tales together, starting out like we expect but intertwining and trading characters until they're leading wholly new lives (and with no narrator to guide them anymore since they kill her off!). It's playing for the next three days and I highly recommend it!

TurboTax hell!

2007-04-09T15:54:54Z

Yesterday was going to be my work-all-day-on-taxes-get-them-done-in-one-big-push day. Instead it was my bang-my-head-on-the-keyboard-in-one-big-frustrated-mess day.

I had bought TurboTax, on CD, back in January, and installed it at the time, and run its autoupdate function once or twice before when I poked at the program since then. So I didn't expect anything to go wrong with the further autoupdate that it wanted me to do yesterday. It downloaded several updates and started running them, but one got stuck: "Searching Hard Drive" appeared while the update called 'maceng' was running.... and it stayed there forever. I finally stopped the installer, which corrupted TurboTax so I reinstalled and went to their website for help. There I learned that I could download a standalone autoupdate program.... which got stuck Searching in its very first step. Much poking around various boards led me to a techy fix posted on TurboTax's help site (replacing a file in the TurboTax package).... which didn't help.

The TT help page said that I could email them, phone them (with a hold time of over 30 minutes) or do a chat help session (with a hold time of under 10 minutes). I did the latterest, and the hold time was actually 30 seconds. But the person I got was methodical/robotic, and made me do every step that I'd already done, which took over an hour and brought no success. Finally she said I should try downloading the standalone autoupdater on another machine. Before I went over to Lisa's to do that (thank you, L!) I asked her what I should do if that didn't work, and she said "call the tech support phone number" - which I suspect was partly to make sure she didn't run the risk of having to work on my problem again! As feared, there was no improvement with the autoupdater downloaded at Lisa's (and how *could* there have been; it's the same file!)

So I tried calling. And to hedge my bet, I also opened a chat-help session. I was on hold in both channels simultaneously, and this time it was the phone that was speedy - I only had to wait 10 minutes, during which time the chat window had gone from saying I was number 8 in the queue to number 7. The person on the phone was very calm and professional - she looked at the record of my problem from the chat session, said that a second-tier engineer had been consulted and that the problem wasn't one they had a solution for yet. So she got my address and is fedexing me the updated program so I'll be able to use it without needing to autoupdate. It took five minutes of talking with her and my problem is (hopefully) solved, or at least workarounded.
More googling has told me that it's likely an incompatibility between their installed and OS X 10.4.9, which was only released a month ago. If there were some way to revert to 10.4.8 I could solve the problem, but I don't know anything about that.

"his sleek, hairless pecs glistening in the surf"...

2007-04-01T03:58:07Z

...is one of those things I would have bet money that George W. Bush would never say on live television. But that's what the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner is all about.

George. Bee. Zay.

2007-03-25T04:42:05Z

We had an impromptu roundsing in our apartment tonight, where 'we' signifies Chris W., Jillian, Noda, Chelsea, Mike C., BDan, Eric, Rebecca, Herbert, Lydia, Mark, and I. There we stumbled upon the first Rounds/Parlorgame crossover that it's ever been my pleasure to play: we sat in a circle and sang the round "George Bizet". Collectively. Each person sang the next note, keeping in tempo with the song, so it circled around and around. When someone goofed up (forgot the syllable or forgot to sing at all) they were out, and we started again with the next person taking the first note.
Then when we got good at it, which happened pretty quickly, after only a few mistakes, we tried a harder version: singing it as a round. So person 'A' sings "George", then person B sings "Bee", then person C sings "Zay" while at the same time person A starts with "George" for the other part. Boy did it fall apart quickly. We made it slightly easier by separating the parts, so it was D starting the first part, and F was singing "Zay" as A started with the "George" of the second part---it was easier this way because separating the voices gave you slightly more time to hear the melodyline that was coming at you before it was your turn to sing in it---but that only meant we could get eight words in before completely falling to pieces instead of six. I'm still optimistic that it's doable with enough practice, but more importantly it was a nonstop half-hour of being reduced to giggles. Highly recommended!

The face on Earth!

2007-03-12T01:11:12Z

Who needs the Face On Mars? It's only visible at low resolution. This one's right here, and quite clear no matter how close you zoom:

Site for a SWIL vacation? We could work on making an earring for it...
Source (link to google maps).

Romantic Meteorological Miracle

2007-02-12T05:59:00Z

(I bet nobody's ever titled an LJ entry that before!)

This is completely awesome: it's the most recent 54-hour-ahead pressure map created by the National Atmospheric Model. In other words, it's a computer simulation of what the barometric pressure will be 54 hours after the program was run. Specifically, the morning of Valentines Day.

The atmosphere appears to be fond of us :^)
(Except that if this winds up being right, the snow I've been hoping for will be mostly rain for us....)

Wireless woes

2007-02-11T16:52:54Z

I spent seven hours yesterday banging my head against wireless technology, with nothing to show for it except a banged-up head. My dad is using my old G3 blue-and-white desktop Mac, and I'm trying to get him on the net. For Christmas I got him comcast high-speed cable internet, whose modem is set up in the room where the TV is. When I move the computer into that room and plug it physically into the modem with an ethernet cable, it works fine. But dad doesn't want the computer there, nor does he want cables snaking around the house. So I want to connect him wirelessly. I bought a wireless PCI card for the G3, since there isn't an official Airport card for it, and it seems to be working fine. I bought an airport base station (the original graphite version, which should be plenty for the G3 and that wireless card). All the pieces are there. But I can't make them work.
Both the G3 and my iBook detect and connect to the airport fine. The airport's lights show that it's communicating both (wirelessly) with the computers and (over ethernet) with the cable modem. But there's no actual connection; nothing loads, from either the G3 or my iBook. Tellingly, one light on the cablemodem, an amber one which usually flashes whenever it's sending/receiving, stays utterly solid when connected to the airport. The airport auto-setup on the CD-rom that came with the airport base station won't run on the G3 because it's using a 3rd-party card, so I have to configure it with the Admin Utility, but I think I'm getting the settings right.... I think. But when I had the G3 hooked up directly and used DHCP, it gave me IP and router addresses starting with 71. When I tried the same thing with the airport, it got assigned number starting with 192. I don't think that should be happening, but I don't really know.

On the hope that there's just a problem with the base station, I'm bringing it back to Swarthmore and I'll see if swapping it for the (non-graphite but oh well) base station we use is any more successful. If it doesn't work there either I'll assume it's the culprit, and see about getting my money back. Sigh, this is enough to make me say maybe the grapes were sour anyway and my dad wouldn't use the net if he had it......

Tales of the Absentminded

2007-01-28T05:08:44Z

Yesterday at the end of Orchestra 2001's rehearsal, as people were leaving, someone noticed a cell phone sitting on the floor next to a music stand. It was next to a water bottle and breath mints, and there was still a score and pencil on the stand, so we figured whoever it belonged to was just in the bathroom. But ten minutes later when almost everyone had left everything was untouched.
Then the phone rang. I picked it up and said approximately "hi, this is Jim Moskowitz instead of who you're calling for. I found this phone; can you tell me who it belongs to?" The call was the wife of one of our players calling him (the person shall remain ~~clueless~~ nameless). I said I'd hold onto the phone and she could have him call me when he got home to figure out what to do. She replied that he wasn't going to be coming home that day; there was an evening performance at Haverford and then he was staying somewhere else. She asked me to hold onto the phone; she'd try to reach him by other means and have him call me. About an hour later the phone rang and it was he, thanking me for keeping care of the phone and asking if I was by any chance going to be in Philadelphia that night. I wasn't, so he said he'd call back after talking to some friends. Two hours later he called and said that a violist living on Yale Ave would be able to being his phone to him if I got it to her. So I put everything in a bag and biked over.
Tonight he gave me a little thank-you gift, a box of chocolate-covered peppermint Altoids. Yum!

He's not the only brain-impaired person. Just now I made myself some hot cocoa and decided to make it minty. Altoids would take too long to dissolve so I put in a drop of peppermint oil. I remarked to Noda that it was neat how when I put it in the lighter-colored layer of foam rushed away from it, leaving a large darker circle. Then I took a sip, not having realized that I'd been observing a phenomenon called 'oil floats on water', and what I sipped was almost entirely the peppermint. Whoooo, is that a way to clear your sinuses! Took ten minutes to get that taste to subside in my mouth, but once I'd stirred the cocoa it was actually pretty good. :^)

Autofocus Creole: a game

2007-01-13T04:45:12Z

You already know about googlewhacking, finding pairs of words that only bring up a single hit when looked for together on google. I decided that's not as good a measure as I'd like of how uncorrelated two words really are, because it doesn't take into account the base rarity of the individual words -- it's not really that odd that two words would only return a single google hit if each of them by themselves are only on a small number of pages. What's more intriguing, to me anyway, are words that by themselves are quite common, but which nevertheless rarely appear together.

So I'm defining a number I call the Google Correlation of two words:

GC(x,y) = #hits for x y / ( (#hits for x) * (#hits for y) )

Most pairs of words will have quite small GCs (except for stormy petrals, I suppose!), but the question is, how small can you get? What's the smallest nonzero GC you can find?

Any googlewhack will have a numerator of 1, but won't necessarily be that tiny because its denominator may also be small. For example, one of the recent finds at googlewhack.com, Jotted cruddiness,
has a GC of 1 / (795000 * 2740) = 4.59073589 * 10^-10.

But my best so far, Autofocus Creole, is down at 685 / (14700000 * 5570000) = 8.36600349 * 10^-12.

So have at it, and share your finds! Anyone who wants to help me make a webpage for people to report these, I'll share all the credit with you once it becomes a fad :^)

Mom update

2007-01-09T17:34:30Z

My mom was moved from intensive care to a regular room yesterday; dad still hasn't been able to speak to the doctor directly (boo, poorly-implemented medical communication system), but he says she looks better, and obviously the hospital agrees. No idea how long she'll be staying there, though.

Thanks, everyone who posted or talked to me about it in the last few days (including Sally Carter, who had no knowledge of the operation but just happened to call for the first time in two years Sunday night; I guess there was some hundredth-monkey phenomenon going on :^)

eclectic_boy @ 2007-01-06T14:05:00

2007-01-06T19:13:28Z

My mom was taken to Jeannes Hospital Thursday night, and operated on Friday morning. They removed part of her small intestine, which had become twisted and necrotic. I don't understand how that can happen without completely clogging it, which would show up right away as an inability to go to the bathroom, but that's an idle concern. I'm at my parents now, and visited her this morning -- she's weak and very tired, but recovering, in the ICU. She kind of half-sleepily recognized that dad and I were there, and was able to whisper a few sentences to us, but that's all. Dad says she's looking better than she had been yesterday, so I'm taking that as a good sign. I'll be over to see her again at dinnertime.
I'm holding up fine; seeing her was a big relief, since I'd only had dad's "she looks pretty bad" to dwell on before that. Send your good thoughts her way for me, please.

Perfection through low resolution?

2006-11-30T07:11:43Z

So I followed this link to a YouTube video of Wilhelm Furtwangler rehearsing part of Brahms' 4th Symphony. The sound quality is awful. The high frequencies and the low frequencies are both cut off. There's hiss. There are even a few instants where the sound drops out entirely. But it's probably the best Brahms 4 I've ever heard.... and then it occurred to me that maybe those are related. Pointillist paintings are all about disjoint dots blending together in the mind; maybe a recording like this one is sweetened in my head, expressly because I can't hear everything in fine detail -- the outlines are there discernably enough, but there's no way to hear things precisely including defects. So my mind fills in whats missing, and of course it does so without unwanted mistakes. The result is, it sounds better explicitly because it's not giving me everything; the trickier-to-get-right details are created in my brain, and created right.

Anyway, go take a look and a listen. If for no other reason than Wilhelm Furtwangler conducts like a maniacal drunken monkey. Skip ahead to about 1:30 in, when the transition from slow tempo to fast happens. (Especially around 3:05!)

Reunion of little rest

2006-10-08T07:18:53Z

The highlights of today, the second day of SWIL's 28th reunion:

* Getting up at 10AM after 6 hours of sleep to run the Belltower Climb. The head of facilities, Stu Hain, deserves our undying appreciation for allowing us to do this, and for standing guard over the entrance (as does Geoff Semenuk of the alumni office for being point person on the mid-tower landing.

Going up the first spiral staircase is no more than a bit claustrophobic, but the second spiral stair is narrower and in the open (as opposed to surrounded by stone walls). If feels like the journey to The Castle in the Air at the end of The Phantom Tollbooth. It's also much scarier coming back down, when you're forced to look down to place your feet.

Though it was overcast, the view was still wonderful. 45 of us went up, in four shifts. Here are just a few pics:

(click for full size)

* A giant SWILmeeting of many eras' worth of fun people.

* Almost going to the hospital for more staples in my head. As I was rushing, late, to gather all the equipment needed for my talent show entry, I once *again* stood up under one of my kitchen cabinets, banging my head seriously. This time it wasn't hard enough to make me black out for an instant, nor to cause blood. It still bloody hurt, and made me very nervous, but I had too much rushing to do to pay it much attention. Everything seems okay, but I definitely have a new (hsort-term?) lump on my head.

* The talent show, including J7's "It's the End of my First Year at Swarthmore", Bhadrika's leading a reenactment of the entire Gashleycrumb Tinies, and my own Liquid Nitrogen mini-show, ending with instant-made ice cream for everybody.

* Advanced roundsinging, including Joel suggesting the Boyce "Alleluia", and Jillian(?) getting us to learn the Ravenscroft "Oaken Leaves".

* Various talking, gaming, and eating until too late. The Hunt was a success too, but I stayed in Kohlberg though it.

Two more slightly-less-full days to go!

Pick a base

2006-10-04T04:31:20Z

In base 16, I just turned 28.
Here in our decimal system, it's 40.
If we used base 8, I'd be 50!
But I think trinary says it best: 1111