Edison did not electrocute any animals to spread fear. Presumably you're referring to the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant which Edison had no involvement with and took place years after the War of the Currents. You're basing your entire argument on a complete and total myth.
Thomas Edison did not attend the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, but his film company did record it, and he did directly fund electrocution of dogs years earlier (1888 is the year mentioned here).
It's also acutely poisonous to dogs, so if you're a dog owner you already have to be careful not to leave anything sweetened with xylitol within reach. I personally won't buy anything with xylitol in it for that reason.
It would take the typical English speaker many years of dedicated study to learn Mandarin Chinese to a level of fluency required to take advantage of any token savings. "Caveman speak" can be adopted instantly, by anyone (in, presumably, ~any language) with no study or time investment required.
The French version version naturally comes to my mind, even when I'm thinking in English, and then I can't find the translation because it's too close, yet so different.
Hardware multipliers often use a sort of base-4-ish lookup table trick as well, using the Booth-Wallace algorithm. Booth's idea is to rewrite one of the inputs in base (usually) "4", except that the digits go from -2 to +2 instead of 0 to 3. (That's five possible digits! This helps the rewriting stage not have to propagate carries. Carry propagation is very expensive.) You can use Booth in a base higher than 4, especially if you know one of the multiplicands before the other, but you run into tradeoffs pretty quickly.
Then for each digit, you select between the other input multiplied by 0 (all zeros), +1 (identity), +2 (shift left by one bit), or -1 or -2 (flip all the bits of +1 or +2, plus a correction). Since a number has about half as many digits in base 4 as in base 2, you have about half as many digits to sum as if you'd done this in base 2.
Then you sum up all those results, but since carry propagation is expensive, you mostly use "compressors", e.g. you sum up three intermediates at a time, but you do it bit-by-bit, where three 1-bit numbers add up to a 2-bit number (from 0 to 3). This is called a Wallace Tree. The point is that you are generating carries, but you aren't propagating them, just adding them back into the set of things to be summed.
At the end of the tree step, you have just two numbers left, and you add them conventionally. That's the only step that needs full carry propagation.
If you are implementing a multiply-add, or multiplying several numbers and adding up all the results or similar, then you usually only need one full carry propagation stage.
The overall circuit has quadratic area but only a logarithmic depth in gates. IIRC whether to do Booth or not is a tradeoff: at least in some circumstances the rewrite steps make it slower but smaller. Hardware tool vendors have done a lot of work to tune these circuits very tightly, using e.g. specialized gates like AOI, heuristics for how to set up the tree, etc.
It's still a modified base 4, because the significance of the i'th digit is 4^i, not 5^i.
Edited to add: I'm also not sure whether real-life implementations have -0 as an option. Of course -0 could be normalized to +0, but it might be cheaper not to bother if the sign is applied after the digit selection.
It isn't balanced quinary, but rather redundant balanced quaternary (base 4). In balanced quinary (base 5), each digit has 5x the significance of the previous one, but in Booth's encoding algorithm it's 4x.
If digit i has significance b^i, then b (the base of the exponentiation) is the base (or radix) of the number system.
The page you linked explicitly mentions the binary version of Booth encoding as having base b=2 and three signed digits {-1, 0, 1}. The quaternary version similarly has b=4 and five signed digits {-2, -1, 0, 1, 2} ... and possibly sometimes -0 in practice, not sure.
Sign of the times, I'm sad to say. The Internet is just chock full of them these days. It's gotten to the point where most of the articles on the NYTimes frontpage don't even mention him.
This is an outrage. I suggest we create a browser extension that completely omits any webpages that don't mention Magnus somewhere. No more wasted bandwidth, creates an incentive for sites to not have non-Manugs-containing pages. Anyone interested in joining my cause?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_%28elephant%29
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