You know you're a scientist when...

You encounter a toy cash register at the local Target and you must drop everything to push every button on the machine, observe the little colored flags that pop up, and try to figure out whether there is any pattern to the correspondence.

Unfortunately, there isn't.

These toy manufacturers should have taken advantage of the opportunity to make the cash register an educational experience for the tykes. Say you pressed "7" and got back

[flag] [no flag] [flag]

Would it really have been so difficult to make the flags stand for the values of the numbers in binary?