Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Finger counting gives away your nationality

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 160 posts

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#51

Post by dylan604 »

moralestapia wrote: post #50
dylan604 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I get your teacher was dumb, but technically it could be on the right side. Let's be fair, a 5 year is only in kindergarten, so I would not expect a kindergarten teacher to be fully expecting a 5 year old to be talking about binary or even fully educated in other counting methods than base 10. That doesn't make them dumb. I'm sure that teacher could teach you things without calling you dumb.

Err... sorry I don't know said teacher, I was just following along your comment, where you seem to portray the teacher in such way. You even do it in this comment, condescendingly, >I would not expect a kindergarten teacher to be [...] fully educated in other counting methods than base 10 Honestly, it's not that big of a deal to know binary or not. But anyway, that aside, you completely missed the point of my comment…

Are you saying that my not expecting a kindergarten teacher to be educated in binary math is condescending?

I got your point that 10 in binary is not actually base 10 10, but 2 in base 10. It was just not worth commenting as it was a discussion about a 5 year old conversation not the semantics of math.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#52

Post by uuddlrlr »

skipants wrote: post #47
pedrosorio wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bbc article claims in the UK (and “many countries in Europe”) start with the thumb, but the Inglorious Basterds scene seems to contradict that. The business insider article also claims people start counting with their thumb in Portugal but I start with the index finger and while I’m not sure everyone else does it, I think using the 3 middle fingers to represent the number 3 (like the British spy) is far more comm…

I'm Canadian and I'm assuming it's the same as Brits: We start counting with our thumb but if we represent a number less than 5 without counting then we do not use our thumb. That's why it doesn't contradict what happened in Inglourious Basterds.

Canuck here too, I grew up starting with index but I see lots of thumb starters.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#53

Post by thom »

Cederfjard wrote: post #45
thom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try it. It works.

People’s anatomy differ, and with that also how easy it is to move these digits independently. See for example the answer to this question: https://biology.stackexchange.com/q/60075

Apologies, I didn’t realise people struggled to this extent. I’ve taught many people to count this way and not encountered anybody who struggled, but it was ableist of me to assume that was universal.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#54

Post by drran »

nikhilgk wrote: post #31
gumby wrote: post #11

> In India, for example, they use the lines between the segments of the fingers to count. My mother does this, and additionally used to do arithmetic this way. She never really taught us how to do math this way.

> In India, for example, they use the lines between the segments of the fingers to count. > This means each digit can represent four numbers and the whole hand can represent 20. The first part is true, but not the second part. You use the thumb as a pointer to track the lines on the other 4 fingers. So you count up to 16 on each hand. Besides, the thumb has 1 line segment less than the other fingers.

It is possible to count to 54 on one hand by counting "bump - valley" and by flipping the hand, so to 108 using both.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#55

Post by rpmisms »

dylan604 wrote: post #39
jjgreen wrote: post #3

Drinking outside a bar in Paris (so table service) with my girlfriend, the glasses approach empty so I turn to catch the barman's eye. He flicks the Vs (I am culturally sensitive so not offended, he means "two more pints?"), I return the thumbs-up. He brings one pint.

That's interesting. How can one differentiate the two then? Does the wrist position matter? A thumb out with the wrist twisted so the thumb is at an angle indicates "1", but a forward thrusted wrist so the thumb is pointing up and towards the person mean "yes, good job"? Is the second meaning lost entirely to the barman? If you had flashed OK hand gesture, would the barman have poured 3 pints, or thought you were a m…

> If you had flashed OK hand gesture... thought you were a member of a fringe group?

For what it's worth, this hand sign being a hate dogwhistle is pretty much entirely an invention of 4chan.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#56

Post by smegger001 »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #32
jhncls wrote: post #7

The correct way is to count in binary, and easily reach 1023 without needing a third hand [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary

I tried ordering 99 glasses of beer because why not, the waiter took a while and finally arrived holding 792 beers.

got to make sure both parties are using the same endian

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#57

Post by kubanczyk »

dylan604 wrote: post #41
tyingq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did index+middle for 2. They would do thumb+index for 2, and thumb+index+middle for 3. They didn't do index+middle for anything other than maybe "peace sign". So from a distance, my "2" would look like "3" to them. It was a rural area in Germany, in the late 80's, early 90's.

Index + middle in an upward movement would probably be taken as something other than peace

No, not likely in 90s in Germany. What you're describing is primarily a UK gesture. (Wikipedia says also known in Ireland, South Africa, Australia, India, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign#As_an_insult

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#58

Post by slim »

dylan604 wrote: post #39
jjgreen wrote: post #3

Drinking outside a bar in Paris (so table service) with my girlfriend, the glasses approach empty so I turn to catch the barman's eye. He flicks the Vs (I am culturally sensitive so not offended, he means "two more pints?"), I return the thumbs-up. He brings one pint.

That's interesting. How can one differentiate the two then? Does the wrist position matter? A thumb out with the wrist twisted so the thumb is at an angle indicates "1", but a forward thrusted wrist so the thumb is pointing up and towards the person mean "yes, good job"? Is the second meaning lost entirely to the barman? If you had flashed OK hand gesture, would the barman have poured 3 pints, or thought you were a m…

He should have nodded his head

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#59

Post by rfrey »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #14
jhncls wrote: post #7

The correct way is to count in binary, and easily reach 1023 without needing a third hand [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary

> and easily reach 1023 without needing a third hand Given that most people cannot move their ring finger independently of their middle finger, this seems like a stretch.

Having just finished my commute home, I'm sorry the converse isn't true.

Re: Finger counting gives away your nationality

#60

Post by MengerSponge »

rpmisms wrote: post #55
dylan604 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. How can one differentiate the two then? Does the wrist position matter? A thumb out with the wrist twisted so the thumb is at an angle indicates "1", but a forward thrusted wrist so the thumb is pointing up and towards the person mean "yes, good job"? Is the second meaning lost entirely to the barman? If you had flashed OK hand gesture, would the barman have poured 3 pints, or thought you were a m…

> If you had flashed OK hand gesture... thought you were a member of a fringe group? For what it's worth, this hand sign being a hate dogwhistle is pretty much entirely an invention of 4chan.

> invention of 4chan

They set out to transform a symbol, and they succeeded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#White_power_symbol

If you think it isn't real because it was made up, Vonnegut's Mother Night has you covered: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Post reply on HN