Sure Enough, There Are Two Suspects
Meghan Haley of Philadelphia, Pa., noticed one of the digits on the address number sign on her home was missing. She checked her security camera and sure enough, a woman had come up on her porch to steal it — just one digit, a zero. “It has no value so I can’t imagine what they are using it for,” she says. Yet it’s part of a rash of such thefts in the area, and police are investigating: around 20 homes are missing digits, all zeros and ones. “I saw a big power drill and a man stealing the number,” says another victim. “It’s kind of weird,” said yet another. “I don’t know if someone is trying to send a message or someone just has an obsession with zeros and ones.” (RC/WTXF Philadelphia) ...There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.Author’s Note: At the turn of the millennium, “SparkCharts” was a well-known reference product. One was a quick reference card for Java, and in the upper margin of one of the panels was the phrase I used for the tagline of this story — attributed in the chart to me. Lots of readers told me about it, and I had a hard time figuring out how it became attributed to me ...but I finally did.
It was included in a humor mailing list I published for a few years that I called Randy’s Random, which name I later recycled into a meme site at that domain. I didn’t write the line, I merely passed it on to the list. Amusing side note: when they published it, they accidentally left out the words “types of” — There are 10 people in the world?! D’oh!
When SparkChart published that card in 2003, they were owned by Barnes & Noble, and considered authoritative. Therefore, the “fact” that I was the line’s author ended up in my Wikipedia entry; I went in and denied authorship ...and was slapped for editing my own entry. Still, it was eventually withdrawn. Jump forward 13 years: when writing this story, I knew it was the perfect tag, so I wrote it in. I still will say that I was not the first to write it!
In the early 2020s a kind reader sent me their well-worn copy of the Java SparkChart, and I finally was able to see it for myself.
This story is in True’s book collections, in Volume 23.
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I believe humanity is held back by the lack of thinking. I provoke thought with examples of what happens when we don’t think, and when we do. This is True is my primary method: stories like this come out every week by email, and basic subscriptions are free. Click here for a subscribe form.