The Hexadecimal Representation Of Color

One evening, I stood outside with my husband admiring the rapidly darkening sky. A thin sliver of moon hung low over the mountains, surrounded by a whole array of stars, sparkling and flashing like so many diamonds. I craned my neck back and asked, in a purely speculative way, "I wonder why it is that some stars shine so brightly...?"

My husband cleared his throat. "Because their cores contain massive fusion reactors which release tremendous amounts of energy. The gravitational friction of stars crumbling inwards makes their cores heat up, and that causes nuclear fusion. So hydrogen atoms fuse into helium atoms, and -- in a nutshell -- that releases an enormous amount of energy which pushes outward against the gravitational contraction of the star..." He went on like that for some time, too, and the amazing thing was that I understood him. Briefly.

My husband does things this all the time. If you ask him what the five kinds of life are, he'll tell you: monera, protist, fungi, animalae, and plantae. If you need to know the capital of Sierra Leone or what the Five Pillars of Islam are, he'll tell you. If you're struggling to make sense of simultaneous equations, he's your man. In a game of Trivial Pursuit, if you're not on his side you don't stand a fighting chance. He's not patronizing and he's not really a know-it-all. He's a teacher.

Teaching isn't a glamorous occupation like fire-fighting or being an astronaut; you'd be hard put to find groups of fashionable people breathlessly hanging onto a teacher's stories at dinner parties. It's not a particularly well-paid occupation either, and unless you've got tenure it isn't really a secure one. You're around grubby, noisy, unreasonable, squabbling people all day long, so teaching is generally an infuriating, demanding, exhausting, and only sometimes, exhilarating job. But there is one great perk of being a teacher: you tend to Know Stuff. There are real benefits to being a teacher -- and being married to one as well.

Last year, on a trip to a local castle, I found the English explanations on the tourist information plaques a little confusing, so I asked my husband if he knew when the castle was built. A guide was standing nearby and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him open his mouth to speak, but my husband launched into a long, detailed explanation of how the castle wall was built during the Byzantine period to defend the town against Arab raids, then further construction was done on it during the Luisignan and Venetian periods -- and I saw the look of amazement in the guide's eyes. We looked like every other middle-aged tourist couple around and in fact we were like every other middle-aged tourist couple around, except for the fact that my husband knows his local history inside-out, having taught it here. I love this because I love learning things.

Before we got married, my husband and I were colleagues, and he had the reputation for being a teacher who would do his level best to get through to the thickest student. I've had complete strangers walk up to me on the street and compliment me for having the good sense to marry a man who can explain things so well and so patiently. And I know I profit from being married to someone who likes to teach. Someone who, knowing full well that I have a hard time with math, will do his damnedest to talk me through an equation or a mathematical formula.

But every teacher has to meet his own special Waterloo, and my husband's has been trying to teach me math. I have a brain that is virtually impermeable to math and anything vaguely math-related.

Still, my husband's math teaching attempts have their uses. As a lifelong insomniac, I'm always on the lookout for things that will lull me to sleep and I prefer natural remedies. Whenever I'm particularly desperate, I just tap him on the shoulder. "How does it go again, the hexadecimal computer color representation thing?" I mumble, and if he's awake, he almost always obliges.

"Okay, hexadecimal -- or base 16 -- is a positional numeral system. Remember?" I nod happily.

"It uses sixteen symbols, generally the numbers 0–9, to represent values zero to nine, and A, B, C, D, E, F to represent values ten to fifteen -- got that?" I nod again, but my head is beginning to swim. Already it's starting to work!

"So, for example, the hexadecimal number 2AF3 would be equal, in decimal, to two times sixteen to the third power -- I haven't lost you, have I?"

I smile and shake my head. "No, I've got that." Which is a total lie.

And, obligingly, he goes on. And on. Something about binary, something else about only zero and one being used to represent on and off...And in no time at all, I'm fast asleep.

A guaranteed cure for insomnia. Just one more perk to being married to a teacher.