00110 11000, 0x7D8

These are my calend'arts. They use binary to display a month and year--mostly, some use hex. The binary version is fairly simple to use, even if you don't know binary. I'm now going to talk about binary as if I was talking to someone who never used it before, because I'm giving these calend'arts to a lot of people and I don't know how much they've done with binary. If you "get it" you can skip the next four paragraphs.

It basically boils down to that old way we learned about counting and math, with a ones place, a tens place, hundreds place, etc. Remember that?

Well anyway, with binary it's very simple. From right to left there's a ones place, a twos place, a fours place, an eights place and so on, doubling every place. Then you have either a zero or a one in that place. So the number 5 would have a 1 at the ones place and a 1 at the fours place. All the other places would have zeroes.

Well, doing a calendar is very easy by this method! Since the largest number of days you need to ever show is 31, you really only need to have a ones, twos, fours, eights and sixteens place (all of these set to 1 would add up to 31). The 10th day of the month would have a 1 at the eights place and at the twos place, with zeroes in the others. So 01010. With the months you only ever need to go to twelve, so you could do it with just ones, twos, fours, and eights. We keep the sixteens around for symmetry; in the months section they'll always be set to zero.

Thus June 9th, the day this text was written, would be displayed with the binary equivalent of six (June is the 6th month) in the months row and nine (the 9th day) in the days row. Shown as...
00110
01001

On these calend'arts, the user is free to decide which is the 1 and which is the 0. When I was making them, I thought of dark as zero and light as one, or warm colors as one and cool colors as zero. Or I just made a shape that looked like a one and a zero, regardless of color. So if one has a bead, the dark side could be zero and the light side one. Or the unpainted side 1 and the painted side zero. I think anytime I added paint to something I treated that as the 1.. But stick with your own system once you pick it or you'll be confused. Users can choose to do M/d or d/M depending on US or UK preference I guess--notation in this proof is going to be M/d.

To date I have made six (00110) variants of these calend'art ideas I had. I realized that while binary and hexadecimal are standardized systems of displaying data, there is nothing standard about using these beads to do it, or necklaces, or flower arrangements. I also really wanted to make objects that had the feel of being hand made and pieces of art that would be worthy of display in one's home, office, or gallery. When does iteration elide into manufacturing? It's a risk I'm willing to take in the name of making these cooler and better.

Lots of additional detail--including a pretty decent explanation of the hexadecimal versions--is included in the picture descriptions.

More calend'arts are in progress in the workshop--it's a pretty fun hobby--and "hard copies" will also be sold on urspimes.com for I don't know, I suppose about 20 bucks. I have some other not-quite-coherent ones that I'm noodling about, like one that uses beads in wave-positions that tells an approximate date by the seasons, not necessarily days and months but still internally consistent. but it's not done yet. I also decided to seize this moment with completed calend'arts rather than incomplete ones.