Handling numbers as strings is one of those data things that’s a pretty consistent pain. I, personally, have had to deal with translating between binary and hexadecimal strings with some regularity. And this is a situational need, so there’s not much reason to expect something pre-built. So I threw together a quick class myself.

First broadcast in 1988, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a television show whose nominal story involves a guy being trapped in space by a couple of mad scientist types…which is actually just an excuse to have a few guys make fun of really, really bad movies. This raises a few unusual questions about the series (as far as TV series go, anyway), like how the movie quality relates to the episode quality. Thankfully, this isn’t too hard to get data on, as we can just look at the IMDB ratings for both.