THOSE CRAZY CHINESE
Chinese (Mandarin) is a highly literal and entertaining language - many words, directly translated, have surprising and informative meanings...
second advance system
While the Chinese people are passionately proud of their prowess in arithmetic and mathematics (my time in China has involved more than a few impromptu maths competitions), they're also privy to a system of numbers which even maths PhD students in the West know nothing about! What is this incredible method? Does it predict the movements of the celestial energy in conjunction with my own Daoist internal energy? Sadly not. In Chinese, the "second advance system" is just plain old Binary code. And for once, I'm at an absolute loss to explain why binary code translates literally as 'second advance system'. Answers on a postcard?
二进制binary
Pretendiname (02 Dec 09)
In a base-2 system, you fill a column (with two possibilities) then move to the next. We probably use a base-10 system because we have 10 fingers.Ricky (02 Dec 09)
Long time ago,Chinese had been has the 'second advance system' , which mapping to the "Binary code" . this the meaning mapping translate,but not the direct translate