Second
if you're interested in finding a good site for basic html information, you should try Dave's site. It was quite helpful in the creation of my beautiful webpage about Mimi. Don't be fooled by how impressive this all looks- html is really just a bunch of simple codes... as long as you know where to find them, you should be fine. Even our complicated table and frames lab can be reduced to knowing the right lingo to use. So, I won't waste time or space here going into it.

Base 10
Now, I find base 10 somewhat confusing. As a religion major, my mind does not process numbers as efficiently as it could. What really helped with this was the use of the abacus. Playing with beads and lanyard (or gimp, or whatever you want to call it) is about the level of computing that I can deal with. So basically, the way that I think of base 10 is that it uses zero's and one's to hold places. So a number such as 10 translates to 2 in normal numbers since there is a zero in the one's spot and a one in the two's spot. Each place increases by a power of two (and therefore progresses from 2 to 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.). Not too hard, right? Just difficult to keep track of inside my head. Anyway, this relates both to logic and to circuits. You might want to check out the logic part before going on to the circuits part of this page just to make sure it all makes sense.

Circuits
Now that we've taken a look at the logic side of things, circuits will make more sense. Basically, we are converting the logic tables into a functioning circuit. Each switch represents either P or Q. Each switch has two positions, 1 or 0. When P and Q are hooked up to a gate, that gate performs some function and gives an output that can be attached to a light bulb. If the light bulb receives the outcome of a 0, it turns off. If it gets a 1, it turns on. The function "x or" has the result of adding base 10 numbers together. "X or" basically means P and not Q OR not P and Q. Known as a half adder, it does not add together longer numbers because it can't take into account the numbers that carry over to the next column. However, by combining two half adders, one gets a full adder. Several full adders can be connected together to account for carrying. It makes much more sense when you can see it. Using Dig Sim 2.5 (which can be found in the server under Data and Software), you can play around with connecting switches and bulbs. It also helps to click on "Show Values" in order to see what values are going into and coming out of each function.