<story><title>The Birkana hexadecimal number symbols</title><url>http://yawar.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-birkana-hexadecimal-number-symbols.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>david-given</author><text>Fun fact: you can count to hexadecimal on the fingers of one hand.&lt;p&gt;The way it works is that each of your four fingers has four well-defined places on them: the three joints, plus the tip. You use your thumb to point at one of these. The first finger represents 1-4, the second 5-8, the third 9-12, the fourth 13-16. You count up and down by moving your thumb.&lt;p&gt;Also, because you use the thumb of the same hand for pointing, you can count two different hexadecimal numbers if you use both hands --- which means you can count to 256.&lt;p&gt;(I don&amp;#x27;t know anybody limber enough to do this with their toes.)&lt;p&gt;As a special bonus: if you point to the fleshy pads of the fingers instead of the joints, you can use the same system for base 12.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Birkana hexadecimal number symbols</title><url>http://yawar.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-birkana-hexadecimal-number-symbols.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FoeNyx</author><text>It could also interestingly be mixed with reflected binary code [1] with only one segment changing between two successive values.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Theoretically, the Unicode Consortium could decide to add the Birkana symbols to the Unicode specification and some enterprising font designer could come up with a set for general use.&lt;p&gt;There are already some runes encoded in unicode, but most of the symbols of the birkana system does not match any existing historical runes though.&lt;p&gt;Yet, there is something in unicode that is somehow visually close [2]: braille patterns (2 columns of 4 rows of dots). 
But sadly the braille dots are not ordered in the same way because it was extended from 6 bits (from top to bottom : left column 123, right column 456) to 8 bits (from top to bottom : left column 1237, right column 4568).&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gray_code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Gray_code&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Braille_Patterns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Braille_Patterns&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>