Subject: Re: How Rich is Rich
So I requested that henceforth my candles would be in binary: yellow for '1', blue for '0' : 49 years therefore became 110001 (32 + 16 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 1)

My brother is a classic computer nerd: math genius, a bit maladjusted to the world. An elementary school teacher called in my parents to show his arithmetic work; it was just a string of nonsensical numbers. Fortunately my father was of the same mind, and recognized that he was just bored and decided to do the entire exercise in binary numbers.