Q:

What does "<<" in "1000 << 16" mean in ruby? 

What does "<<" in "1000 << 16" mean in ruby? 
I know that for strings << can be used for concatenation, but I don't understand what it does for ints.  Could someone please explain? 

A:

This is the left shift bitwise operator. 

A:

What it should do is take the binary representation of one thousand and shift the bits to the left sixteen spaces.  Effectively, it multiplies the number by 65,536.