@jrus You got a binary editor widget prototype out of it. So I guess I got your message at least. 
(I enjoyed the talk btw!)
Here in use, https://observablehq.com/d/4cf4e485cc6dedb2
I think it will take some nontrivial additional work to make it easy for people to find interesting patterns. But I think bit flippers are overall better than sliders.
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Nice! I can see where it’d be convenient to include a slider as well so that you can sweep over large parameter ranges quickly, though how that works is a little ill-defined. Maybe just for the mantissa?
Here’s another reusable input that’s suitable for driving animations while affording interactive control on demand:
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I just added on my TODO list “talk about NaNs in IEEE floating point” because your binary input made me think about it. Mostly, about the huge space of NaNs that are available.
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Also fun to locate: +Inf, -Inf, subnormals… and 1 actually took a surprising amount of clicking around to find. I had no idea about offset binary and how that might actually be stored.
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Yeah, there are a number of useful ways someone might want to input floating point numbers.
Just showing the raw bits for the exponent part (in particular) is probably not the clearest if the goal is to get novices to put numbers in instead of learn the sneaky details of the format per se.
Dealing with the offset binary exponent can be a bit annoying, and can make for somewhat confusing/cryptic code if you try to manipulate floats as bits in some kind of moderately efficient way. You can see some of this type of bit twiddling at https://observablehq.com/@jrus/pj
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I wish I had seen this post earlier - is there some way to subscribe to these meetup announcements?
@jflatow — Following @observablehq on Twitter is going to be the easiest way to keep abreast of Meetup announcements for the time being.
Also, within the next month or so we’ll settle on a consistent cadence for these meetups (e.g., the second Tuesday of every month) so that you can add a recurring event or reminder to your calendar. And if you happen to miss the current month’s, you can plan for the next one!
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If you are still looking for ideas for input options, options for custom textContent for the button could be really useful. This then would almost require also an option for custom styles for the button, and the input range element:
This adds custom text for the buttons, almost trivially. I think custom styles would be also not hard to add. There is a way to modify the style of the form from another cell but this seems awkward.