Learning from Fear.

This Ted talk was particularly inspiring as it presented Fear in a totally different light. It really taught me why fear was good and how we can harness the positivity of fear.

In this talk, the speaker explores how fear is just as similar to a story, where the character roles are played by us. It has the same structure with a beginning, body and the ending/climax. It’s only humans who are able to project themselves into the trajectory of time, thereby imagining the path into our future. We often think fear is what that limits us, hinders our progress. We see fear as something negative, something to be overcome, something to be conquered to attain success.

In the perspective of the talk, however, it provided me valuable insight into how fear actually prepares us for the worst. What might have been a surprise, will then no longer be one, since we had already anticipated it(the story) to occur. It leaves us to face the consequences bravely. Hence forth, we can utilise fear to our advantage.

Such questions, made me appreciate fear as God’s gift. It is the one that inevitably controls us, and prepares us for the consequences.

Imagine us living in a world without fear for anything. It will be disastrous. No one will bother about committing a crime, for our fear will not be present to intimidate and warn us of the consequences of committing it.  No one will care about the world of tomorrow.

As such, fear is not something we should despise. It is part of all living things and something that ensures their survival.

Instead of fearing fear, let us learn to learn from fear.

Converting from Decimal to Binary

After seeing such complicated posts on the Internet, I decided to simplify things and write this brief guide to convert any decimal number to a binary number (which is base 2).

Let’s take the example, a decimal number 219.

Steps to convert to decimal:

1)     Take the largest number of the power of 2, in this case 2⁷ and subtract it from 219. You will get a remainder of 91.

2)     Repeat step one, now taking the new remainder as the base number. You will obtain a remainder of 27 after subtracting 2⁶.

3)     Repeating for 27, we get a remainder of 11 after subtracting 2⁴.

4)     For 11, we get a remainder of 3 after subtracting 2³.

5)     For 3, we get a remainder of 1 after subtracting 2¹.

6)     For the remainder of 1, note that 1 = 2⁰.

7)     Now we are ready to get our binary number.  We will have 8 digit places to fill (note that counting starts from 0). For each power of 2 you have utilised in the above steps, put a ‘1’ into the corresponding digit place.

1

1

0

1

1

0

1

1

That’s it. Voila! We have 219 converted into our binary number: 11011011

And of course the reverse process will get you the decimal number, that is: 2⁷ + 2⁶ + 2⁴ + 2³ + 2¹ + 2⁰ = 219

Please do leave your comments or suggestions below! Thanks.