FoxTrot Classics by Bill Amend for November 09, 2017

Nice try, Jason, you bullying baby brother. The answer is 15.

You really didn’t think he would give her the correct answer, did you…he never does!

He might give her a correct answer….in binary.

I guess this was before cheap calculators and cell phones with calculator apps. The Mac was introduced in 1984 (with that scary video based on the novel 1984), so this comic was produced after that; and HP introduced the first handheld scientific calculator in 1972 (for about 400 bucks). Today, nobody needs to know long division, or how to multiply and divide using logarithms, or use a slide rule. I wonder if grade schools still teach long division. Anybody know?

I did that once in a PC game I coded. I used the digits in the system clock’s current time as the seed.

One time pad?

I remember writing a random number generator in BASIC (quite a while ago). I think I also based it off the clock. It was NOT hard to write. I used it as a base for generating dice rolls depending on which die you used. Everything from a D4 to a D20 and up to 10 die at the same time. Then I wrote one to convert numbers to Roman numerals. That one was a bit trickier. They were fun to write.

Its 15