Square 101

Four satellites, one tiny dot on the map — you. Discover how GPS makes it happen....

Unlocking the Secret of Barcodes: More Than Just Stripes....

When you type a message, upload a photo, or visit a website, that content needs to be understood by a computer. The challenge is, as we found out in the first issue, computers don’t understand text, images, or emojis the way we do. They only understand 0s and 1s—binary. But going directly from human-readable content to raw binary would be chaotic and unstructured, as there would be no standard rules. That’s where encoding comes in. Think of encoding as a bridge between human-readable data and t...

In my previous posts, I delved into the inner workings of our smart devices. Now, I want to focus on another fundamental concept: how these devices connect and communicate through a network. Imagine a small town where each house is a device. If no roads connect the houses, sending messages is difficult, slow, and unreliable, requiring travel through fields or forests. To solve this, the town builds paths and roads, enabling people to easily exchange letters or packages by walking, biking, or dr...

In my last issue on binary format, I mentioned that transistors are the building blocks of modern computers. That's a specific purpose, though. In a broader sense, transistors are the fundamental building blocks of modern electronics, enabling a wide range of devices, from computers and smartphones to medical devices and automobiles. Transistors are like the LEGO bricks of modern electronics—small, simple pieces that build up to incredible things. The latest smartphones have billions of these in...

We often hear that computers talk in binary. But what does that term mean? Well, "binary" means "relating to, composed of, or involving two things". In other words, it counts everything in base 2 rather than base 10. What do I mean by that? Let me explain with an example. Humans tend to use base 10, which means we count using ten digits: 0 through 9. When we reach 9, the next number resets the current digit to 0 and adds a new one to the left, just like 9 turns into 10. Each place in a number r...