Prologue

Now I have known for years that two-bits is a quarter, and four bits is fifty cents. In fact, use of the word bits in currency terms had all but stopped before I was born, because I remember asking “what does two-bits mean?” when I heard my parents and aunts and uncles using the expression, “Shave and a Haircut, two bits.”  I’m sure that even when I was very, very, young, inflation had written that song out of reality.

I do remember chocolate bars being a quarter though.  Ah, good times …

At any rate, it used to take eight bits to make a whole, going back to the days when the Spanish silver currency would be physically cut up into “eight bits” (little pizza-sliced bits of coin, hence, Pieces of Eight) and traded for items worth less than a full coin. It’s easy enough to cut a coin in half, and a half in half, and a halved half in half — but dividing a whole up into ten pieces was way too tricky back in the day. So no decimal based currency back then. (For more on this little digression, you may find some really interesting bits on the Wikipedia entry, like I just did. I especially liked short bit and long bit. BTW, there were 2 puns in that linked text. Plus I changed the title to put it there, too.)

However, today we are here to capture the essence of the Whole in only Four Bits.

The Noun Project
They make attribution SO easy!

This is the first time I have undertaken the One Story / Four Icon assignment, and I fear that I have made the following retells too easy. I found it very difficult to not be too iconic. However,  it has been a very valuable opportunity to poke around in The Noun Project, to play with some .svg graphics files (aha — @bellekid, I got there about half an hour after you did, I think!) and to note how nicely they have set up their site to support attribution. Very nice, in fact! Specifying the image name might make understanding the noun choices a bit too easy to interpret, however, I did combine two into one (and added some) for one icon, and only used part of one for another. So have a go!

I also encourage you to submit your guesses via the embedded Google form below. That way you can commit to your guess, and yet not publicly give away your guess, thereby not make it too easy or too little fun for all the others who will be playing. There will be a prize(s) awarded at the end of the week. Oooh!

 The First Challenge

The Second Challenge

Image Attributions

Clock designed by Brandon Hopkins from The Noun Project
Robot designed by Simon Child from The Noun Project
Earth designed by Francesco Paleari from The Noun Project
Peace designed by Jim Slatton from The Noun Project
Bone designed by Massimiliano Mauro from The Noun Project
New Moon designed by Adam Whitcroft from The Noun Project
Full Moon designed by Alex Fuller from The Noun Project
Rocket designed by Cris Dobbins from The Noun Project
Evolution designed by Jakob Vogel from The Noun Project