Re: [lojban] hexadecimal and lojban

[Rob Speer <rob@twcny.rr.com>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 03:09:48AM -0000, thinkit8@lycos.com wrote:
> now please don't tell me dau-vai will ever be taken out.  it'd be 
> nice if they weren't relegated to look different than 0-9, which is a 
> decimal bias, but it shouldn't be too much a problem.  not enough 2-
> letter cmavo to go around anyway.  by the way, i continually annoy 
> all sorts of newsgroups and IRC with rantings on the evils of decimal.

I find Lojban's hex cmavo useful, but not for communicating in Lojban - rather,
I'm trying to impress them into my brain so I can remember hex numbers more
clearly, having a way to mentally recall them with a sound attached.

When setting up my sound card in Linux (before there was a real Linux driver
for it), I had to remember its three
IO addresses - 220, 240, and 2A0. I thought I had remembered these well enough
that when I did it again months later, I didn't need to look for them in the
manual. I dug these numbers out of my subconscious - two-twenty, two-forty, and
two-ay-ee. Two-eighty. Right.

My almost-perfect memory was rewarded with a loud staticky noise from my
speakers on bootup.

So I suppose the hex cmavo are useful, if only so that in future situations
like that I can remember "rereno, revono, redauno" and save my eardrums. I
doubt the Lojban creators intended the hex cmavo to primarily be a memory
trick, though.
-- 
Rob Speer