You know how you can multiply or divide both sides of an equation and it’s still true? Turns out you can take the logarithm of both sides and it’s still true. To figure out how many bits are in a MAC address, the equation becomes 2 to the x = 16 to the 12. Still with me? The next part is my favorite part of the story. That means the number of possible outcomes is 16 raised to the power of 12. That’s 16 possible outcomes for each digit. What about this MAC address thing? As Bart explained last week, MAC addresses have 12 digits, where each digit can be 0-9 and a-f. Now that we can calculate how many bits we have where there’s only 1s and 0s. So 3 coins is 2 raised to the power of 3. What about 3 coins or bits? It turns out the answer is 2 to the power of however many of them you have.

Same thing with bits, they’re 1 or 0 so two possible outcomes with one bit. A coin has heads and tails, so two possible outcomes. He explained bit by talking through flipping of a coin. I know I should already know this and I explained to him that he’s just the next in a long line of people attempting to get it to stick in my brain, but he said he was determined to get me to understand.

Bart first had to explain to me what bits were. First of all, Bart wasn’t technically wrong, but DJ and Kevin are more specifically correct.īecause Bart and I are nerds, we decided to work out the answer, and actually “do the math” and see if they’re right that MAC addresses are 48 bits not 64 bits. Now this is going to sound a bit like explaining the tax code but I hope you’ll bear with me because there are a couple of parts here I think are interesting. They both explained that MAC addresses as we are used to seeing them, are 48 bits, not 64 bits. This is conveniently the length of a MAC address. In IPv6, the host part is always 64bits long. Seriously,Īnyway, they were both commenting on this statement: As always though, Bart is weird in that he actually likes to be corrected.

One of the rules of this episode was that Bart only had a few days to learn the background himself so it was expected there might be errors. After the show aired, Kevin Jones DM’d me on Twitter and DJ made a comment on the blog, both with the same correction. In last week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond, I asked Bart to come during his off season to explain IPv6 to us.

Convert mac address to ipv6 address