CS10 Outline: Lab Topics

CS10 OUTLINE

General History
Ideas About Weblike Systems
Lab Topics

LAB TOPICS

we learned some basic HyperText Markup Language tags, making webpages and putting Berners-Lee's invention to good use

I would list the tags here, but I'm lazy and have spent all night actually writing them, so you can look at my sourcecode or check HTML Goodies if you want to know how to make tables, bold or italic words, or words in different colors.

further attempts at HTML can be seen here

finally, every time you click on a hyperlink, please think of Vannevar Bush.

Binary Basics

in binary (base 2), there are only two numbers: 0 and 1. just pretend all the other numbers have gone into hibernation or something.

in base 10, we're familiar with place values: ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. in base 2, the place values are powers of 2, starting with 2^0: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.

you can write any base 10 number in binary by adding up the zeros and ones in their respective place values. it's pretty cool.

binary's 0s and 1s are important when it comes to making logic gates using Boolean logic

Boolean Truth Tables

Boole's system is made of "propositional symbols", which are usually letters of the alphabet (P and Q, C and Z, it doesn't really matter).

logical operators
0 = false and 1 = true in Boolean logic
arithmetic can be done using Boolean logic! I'm not entirely sure how, but it's good to know that someone can do it.

Circuits

an extension of Boolean logic: the logical operators listed above can be used as "logic gates" in circuits
all truth tables can be expressed as circuits
the NOT gate looks very cute when decorated as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer