you might be interested in this little piece of info too. i learnt this soon after learning the & 1 trick...
when dealing with a binary number, say 1110, if you want to refer to the 0 bit, or the value on the far right etc, the common way to do so is to refer to the 'lsb' which stands for least significant bit.
i gather its the least significant, because its only 2^0, as opposed to the next few bits which are 2^1, 2^2, etc.
this guy that explained all this also ran a test on using & 1 vs using % to gauge odd/even'ness of a number, up to values of 10 000 000. the total time taken for the & method was 3.6 seconds, while the % was 4.9. so the & method is not only leeter looking, but much faster too.
i'm betting that the % operator makes use of & somewhere further up the class hierarchy, but i'd obviously need some guru to confirm this.
interesting stuff. your random fact for the day. learning that & trick left me feeling very satisfied earlier this morning. it felt good to be a geek.
