Bitstrings

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” — Douglas Adams

In the realm of binary data, there has long been an assumption that everything should align on byte boundaries (8 bits), because bytes are civilized units that everyone understands. Bitstrings, however, are the dolphins of the data world—mucking about at arbitrary bit boundaries and being perfectly content with sequences of 7, 13, or 42 bits, having a good time while the byte-aligned world looks on in mild confusion.