hoakley September 2, 2019 General, Macs, Technology

Solutions to Saturday Mac riddles 10

I hope that you enjoyed Saturday’s Mac Riddles, episode 10. Here are my solutions to them.

1: Activity Monitor
If you think I’m going to keep an eye on (Monitor) your working out (Activity) you’ll be disappointed, but I’ll process (it lists processes) those on your Mac. What am I?

2: GCD, Grand Central Dispatch
My first might seem overambitious (grand), my second is in the middle (central), and my last is about sending (dispatch) rather than a railhead (Grand Central Station). Together we’ll run in parallel (what GCD does). What am I?

3: Where do you commonly encounter undecimal digits? Answer: In the check digit given at the end of an ISBN-10 number, where the digit, a checksum mod 11, ranges from 0 to X (= 10), i.e. is base 11, or undecimal (see duodecimal, which is base 12). See Wikipedia.

I look forward to your putting alternative cases.

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mls14cim on September 2, 2019 at 4:11 pm

Undecimal digits: HTML color codes (hexadecimal), and on our hands (fingers are digits!)

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  hoakley on September 2, 2019 at 4:20 pm
  
  Thanks.
  Sadly, undecimal doesn’t mean non-decimal, which was part of the trick in the question here. It’s similar to duodecimal, which means base 12; undecimal means base 11. The only occasion in which humans nearly came to use undecimal was during the French Revolution. Some of the revolutionaries wanted to change to base 12 (which has its strengths), others to remain with base 10. It was jokingly suggested that they might compromise with undecimal, base 11, but thankfully no one took that seriously.
  Other than checksum in older ISBNs, I haven’t able to find anywhere else it has actually been used.
  Howard.
  
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