if, like me, you sometimes count using your fingers, odds are you can count up to 5 things on one hand (using 5 fingers). but that's if you're using "unary" notation, whereby you only have a single digit (pun intended) at your disposal, a finger, which you can think of as a 1. binary, by contrast, allows you to use two digits, 0 and 1. how high could you count on one hand (with 5 fingers) using binary? assume that a raised finger represents a 1 and a lowered finger represents a 0.