Why #2? Because anything lighter might not register as a filled-in bubble. Anything darker might still register\u2014even after you\u2019ve erased it. Know what that process is called? Of taking various shades of graphite and making an all-or-nothing decision on them? It\u2019s called Digitization.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no doubt about it: the world is analog. Shades of gray occur all the time. So, why don\u2019t computers operate on shades of gray? It takes longer to resolve and it\u2019s not as repeatable. Computers (& all digital electronics) are based on a philosophy of doing extremely simple things very<\/strong> fast, very<\/strong> reliably.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Our brains, on the other hand, are built to allow for very complex connections that take time to resolve. And may resolve differently each time.<\/p>\n Once that Scantron machine has all our answers stored digitally, it can do a lot of amazing things. It can make identical copies of our multiple-choice selections. It can tally how everyone who was born on a Tuesday answered question # 123. (Turns out people born on a Tuesday are<\/span> smarter.)<\/p>\n Why? (The Scantron operations, not the smart people born on Tuesday) Because these operations can be broken down into simple manipulations of 1\u2019s and 0\u2019s. You either got the question right or you didn\u2019t. There\u2019s no partial credit. Even if you filled in A<\/em> 25% and D<\/em> 75%, it makes a hard decision and picks one for you.<\/p>\n The building blocks of digital electronics are made to go fast and get the same answer every time. They\u2019re also very small. I mean tiny. I mean that the width of my hair can handle a heck of a lot of these building blocks. So, when I put them all together, I end up with something that\u2019s way more complicated. And powerful.<\/p>\n So, in the past, you might have had to answer 10 questions on a test. It might be a word problem. It might ask you about trains headed for each other. You might get partial credit if you wrote down the right equation but solved it wrong.<\/p>\n With Scantron, you don\u2019t just get 10 problems. You get like 100. Since the computer can\u2019t give you partial credit, it just asks you a lot of questions. If you know you\u2019re stuff, you\u2019ll likely get more of them right. It\u2019ll be a pretty good approximation to getting partial credit.<\/p>\n So, the philosophy with digital electronics is to do many, many small crude 1 or 0<\/span> measurements, rather than a few precise measurements. Each individual measurement isn\u2019t as important. What\u2019s important is that we can store and process these measurements quickly reliably.<\/p>\n I sat down to write this blog entry. Just me and my Dixon Ticonderoga #2. First thing I wrote was \u201cAnalog is like grayscale.\u201d I immediately erased it. Even the word \u201cgrayscale\u201d is too technical for what I want to explain. Remember Scantron? You used to have to bring a #2 pencil to take the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-layperson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/poCEy-3R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":303,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Circuit](\"http:\/\/www.circuitdesign.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/09\/circuitdesignblogscantron002-thumb.jpg\")
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