It frustrates me that there has been a rather simple way of doing this, as I've been trying to come up with a way to express 1-10 on one hand for (literally) 12 years now. My method involved memorizing certain key sequences of finger combinations, such as the thumb alone for 6, and the index finger for 1. I could never devise a proper method for 10. I should have figured that binary code would be the perfect solution, as it is well known and easily applicable, with a few minor caveats. The major drawback is agreeig on alignment, but the use of the thumb for 1 is rather logical. The other major drawback is that outside of nerds, nobody's going to know how to count in binary. But once you begin teaching the system, you only have to teach to count to 4, as the rest is pretty self explanatory after that. The fact that the ring finger cannot be raised easily by itself is problematic, but not nearly as problematic as the fact that 4 = "the bird" (my workaround is to espress 3 on one hand and 1 on another). But otherwise it's pertty good. A quick primer on counting in binary: Binary counts with just 2 expressions: 0 and 1 (on and off) Base 10 counts with 10 expressions: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 Base 10 counting: 00 - 0 01 - 1 02 - 2 03 - 3 04 - 4 05 - 5 06 - 6 07 - 7 08 - 8 09 - 9 10 - 10 Binary (Base 2) counting 0000 - 0 0001 - 1 0010 - 2 0011 - 3 0100 - 4 0101 - 5 0110 - 6 0111 - 7 1000 - 8 1001 - 9 1010 - 10 An easy way to think of it is to assign a value to each "on" column and then just add as needed to get the number you want. In this 4 column example the values are: 8,4,2,1 So if you want 13, turn "on" the 8,4,1 (8+4+1=13) columns, and leave 2 "off" 1101 = 13 If you want 7, turn "on" 4,2,1 (4+2+1=7) columns, and leave 8 "off" 0111 = 7 Simple really. Except for that whole 4 problem. 4 is very problematic.
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