Everything about this band called the JAMS

Have you ever the JAMS? They're a pretty good band, these two British guys who make music. Wikipedia calls it alternative hip-hop, but that misses the point. In 1987, they put out an album called 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On) that was remarkable for its unlicensed sampling. One song, The Queen and I, sampled Dancing Queen by ABBA, whose management eventually forced them to withdraw the album from sales and hand over the masters. Dick move, right?

The JAMS, being the nice guys that they are, responded by traveling to Sweden to appeal to ABBA's sense of artistic decency to allow the album to live. They couldn't, because its fucking ABBA, so instead they blasted The Queen and I outside the window of ABBA's management's office's window. The album was destroyed, but you can still torrent the thing. If you do torrent it, make sure you get the right version of the album, because in the aftermath they re-released the album without the samples. Evidently, it's mostly silence and drum machines.

If you're not sold on this album already, you should know about their brief foray into art. So these guys released another album, this time one that wasn't mired in legal battles, and made a ton of cash. They didn't know what to do with it, so they set up the K Foundation. They did some cool things, like give an award to some lady for being the worst artist in Britain the day she won some award for being the best artist in Britain. (It was some high concept shit that they hated for some reason.) Anyway, they still had a million quid left, and they made a piece of art with it, but the whole thing was getting out of hand, so one of these guys says to the other, "how about we burn it?" so they did. They made a movie of it:

BONUS MATH IS FUN WIKILITERACY

Okay, so I found* something delightful. It has to do with number bases, and if you're not familiar with the concept, the delightful concept won't be particularly delightful, so a primer on that first.

The way we count has ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. When we need to describe an amount greater than nine, which happens fairly regularly, we need to employ two or more digits at once, so we use 1 and 0 to render 10. We put two digits side by side because we are describing a number so great that no single digit could possible describe its enormity! That we manage to parse it so unconsciously is a testament to the effectiveness of the standard. (Compare that to XML, kids!)

But, there are other ways of counting, ways that use more or less digits. You might be familiar with binary, which has but two digits to represent the values of zero to infinity: 1 and 0. If you want to count higher than 1, which I find happens all the time, you need to bring out two digits. So we count 1, then 10. Now, if we count one higher, we go to 11. Still with me? Suppose we need to add one to 11 in binary: we can't just put 12, can we! Heaven forbid! Binary knows nothing of this 'two' you speak of. No, we have to use yet another digit! Go straight to 100! And then 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, and so on.

Your numbers get long a bit more quickly this way, but that's just life for people in binary. It's not without it's benefits, either: if you feel like you'd be more satisfied with your life or more accomplished if you earned a large sum of money**, you could describe your wealth in binary. You only need 64 dollars (or whatever your local currency is) to be a [binary] millionaire!

Obviously, you can describe numbers with any other base. Back in the hunter-gatherer day, people would just count to five. Those were simpler times, and you didn't need to describe big numbers all that much. "One buffalo, two buffalo, three buffalo, four buffalo, ten buffalo," you'd say. And sometimes people count bases greater than ten, like hexadecimal, where the sixtenth number is 10. You count 1, 2, 3 ... 8, 9, A, B, C, D E, F, 10.

Anyway:

In mathematical numeral systems, the base or radix for the simplest case is the number of unique digits, including zero, that a positional numeral system uses to represent numbers. For example, for the decimal system (the most common system in use today) the radix is ten, because it uses the ten digits from 0 through 9.

*I mean found as 'felt', more than 'discover' or 'encounter'.

** This joke was originally about penis size, but then it occurred to me that...

• ...even a remarkedly small penis's length converted to binary would be gargantuan. According to Wikipedia***, a penis that is of at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean human penis size is described in medical contexts as a micropenis. Some person good with figures worked out that means that the cut off for micropenishood is 7cm, which converts to 111. That's about three and a half feet.

... and ...

• ...for Christ's sake, my mom reads this blog. I can't be talking about dicks all day.

*** Also, about that micropenis article, it has one of those little breaks of style that inexplicably persist on some pages. Just read this wonderful bit of uncited prose:

Most eight- to fourteen-year-old boys referred for micropenis do not have the micropenis condition. Such concerns are usually explained by one of the following:

1. a penis concealed in suprapubic fat (extra fat around the mons pubis).
2. a large body and frame for which a prepubertal penis simply appears too small.
3. delayed puberty with every reason to expect good future growth.

I like to think that the reason the above section remains is that even the most -- and I mean this in the best possible way -- zealously pedantic editors of Wikipedia were once eight-to-fourteen-year-olds who felt uncomfortable about their awkward, growing bodies, and who feel that if they had read something like this in their adolescence, maybe the whole thing would have been a tiny bit easier. God, I love to see that: when someone is encumbered by a system, for better or worse, and to see some twitch of anarchy empower them to act as they feel. You see it in dogs, sometimes, who, despite being bred more self-sacrafice, still sometimes act on their own behalf and stand up for themselves. It's very encouraging, somehow.