Think about how everything in the computer is represented as binary ones and zeroes. That's kind of weird. When a non-programmer counts 5 items in the real worl

Think about how everything in the computer is represented as binary ones and zeroes. That's kind of weird. When a non-programmer counts 5 items in the real world, they don't think of it as being equivalent to saying "101", or "YES NO YES". Now imagine you have a set of questions like that, to be stored for kajillions of items. You can efficiently pack those yes-no questions into a single number for each item. Like, in the unix file permission system, 5 expands out to "let others read this; don't let others write this; let others execute this".