11 ms·
Seximal: A better way to count [video]
- Aardwolf 8y agoI think hexadecimal is better, it has the advantage of super easy conversion from/to binary, the most fundamental number system. We just need a good naming scheme for counting in hex :)
- iaw 8y agoF-hundred and c-tee-five doesn't just roll off the tongue does it?
- thomastjeffery 8y agoI think it would be better to just use new words. Using decimal digits for another base gets a little ambiguous anyway.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jobigoud 8y agoUsing specific words is cultural. There are languages were in order to say a big number you just enumerate its digits.
- yorwba 8y agoSuch as Tongan: http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/tongan.html http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number/tongan.html Do you know of another unrelated language that works similarly?
- FroshKiller 8y agoIt's been posted before: http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/ http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jjnoakes 8y ago> binary, the most fundamental number system I think base 1 is a little more fundamental than base 2, no?
- hervature 8y agoMathematically speaking, base 1 doesn't make any sense. Using 1 as a radix yields something incoherent. But I think you mean simply making a mark for every unit (like how most people count inventory) which is definitely more fundamental in a different way.
- jjnoakes 8y agoI mean 1 dec == 1 unit (1x1^0) 2 dec == 11 unit (1x1^0 + 1x1^1) 3 dec == 111 unit (1x1^0 + 1x1^1 + 1x1^2) etc. Just like the other bases, with "1" instead of "2" or "10". Well, maybe not "just like", the digit I have to use to represent each power of 1 is 1 and not 0, but I think that's a small concession.
- gowld 8y agoThat's not a "base". In base-n, the valid digits are 0..[n-1]. In your system, 1 = 10 = 100 = 1000, and 11 == 101 = 110, and 101 = 1+1 = 11. It's useless as a notation for arithmetic resembling like what bases are used for. In base 1, the only valid digit is 0, so the only valid number is unit.
- jjnoakes 8y agoRight, I addressed that in my post...
- hahahihi 8y agowriting ten like 1111111111 seems obvious enough, dividing by 11111 being 11 is alsof easy... but how fractions? Say 1 divided by 11111? I cant even imagine.
- thomastjeffery 8y ago
- schoen 8y agoA number of people (well, maybe at least 0xF people) have made suggestions about this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pronounce+hex+digits https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pronounce+hex+digits
- zeth___ 8y agoThe most efficient number system is ternary. If you go for balanced ternary you also get addition and subtraction for free, and multiplication is not much worse than for binary.
- compsciphd 8y agosame person posting the same video every so often https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17083858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17083858
- Nadya 8y agoOnce is not "every so often" [0] and reposting something that you feel is worthwhile but didn't gain traction is acceptable. This is mentioned in the FAQ [1] as it's basically a "keep it reasonable" honor system. Sometimes when you post something matters. For example, I've posted something and it got 1 upvote and fell off the front page - then was reposted 2 days later by someone else and was on the front page for the day. I just had poor timing as there were other far more popular stories going on at the time. >Are reposts ok? >If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. On topic: I agree with Aardwolf, I prefer Hexadecimal but having a better symbols for A-F would improve it. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aleyan https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aleyan [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- compsciphd 8y agoso, you're right in a sense. I wanted a non video link to read about it, so googled, and all I found up top was 2 hacker news links (apparently one of them was the same as this, google indexed it pretty quickly) and the youtube video (so didn't do me much good). I assumed (incorrectly) that 2 links I saw via google would have made this 3 at least)
- aleyan 8y agoI am the same person as me who submitted it a month ago; guilty as charged. Seximal sounded quite interesting and the HN mods agreed, asking me to repost [0] it in manner described by hliyan (no relation) and dang. This is not the first time they asked me to do that, though more often I repost stuff out of my own volition. My submitted log is really a catalog of interesting things I find on the internet that I occasionally revisit and repost with a thought "more people should hear about this and I want to hear what they have to say about it". You are welcome to browse through it [1] and repost things you like. Maybe you will even get to the front page! Regarding your search for a non-video link in the grandchild comment, you are in luck. Read about seximal here [2] and make sure to click through the hamburger menu, that's where the meat of the website is at. Unfortunately the website and the video content is not fully overlapping so you kinda have to watch and read both for the fullest understanding of seximal. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10285392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10285392 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aleyan https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aleyan [2] https://www.seximal.net/ https://www.seximal.net/
- cjensen 8y agoBase-12 is nice because, like Seximal it is divisible by both the first and second prime number (2 and 3). But it is also divisible by the first prime (2) twice, and doesn't immediately overflow into extra digits. So 10 in base 12 can be exactly divided by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9. Compare this to base 10 where 10 can only be exactly divided by 2, 4, 5, and 8.
- airstrike 8y agoHow exactly can 10 be divided by 4 and 8?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ythn 8y agoMaybe he meant you don't end up with a number with infinite digits? 10/4 = 2.5 vs. 10/3 = 3.33333...
- thomastjeffery 8y agoIn decimal: 10 / 4 = 2.5 2.5 can be represented exactly in decimal. As opposed to: 10 / 3 = 3.33333333333... which cannot. In duodecimal (10=dozen, A=ten): 10 / 3 = 4 A / 3 = 3.4
- gowld 8y agoyou need an extra blank line, or indent 3 spaces, to preserve linebreaks: 10 / 3 = 4 A / 3 = 3.4 10 / 3 = 4 A / 3 = 3.4
- thomastjeffery 8y agoUnfortunately, it is too late to edit; but thanks!
- dnautics 8y agoExact divisors are not what they are cracked up to be. By and large most divisions will wind up falling on an inexact division. One neat property of a prime base is that detecting exact divisions is easy: Just count trailing zeros in your result. E.g:. Ob110010 / 0b101 == 0b1010 which has the expected number of zeros at the end. You can't count on this in decimals, e.g. 50 / 25 == 2.
- mdellabitta 8y agoI was taught basic counting, addition, and subtraction using a finger-abacus system called Chisanbop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisanbop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisanbop Now I'm plagued by off-by-one errors in my mental math, particularly when it comes to intervals. If you ask me how many days there are between now and Christmas, I will be uncertain about the answer unless I individually count them all off on my fingers.
- wodenokoto 8y agoI think everybody are uncertain about such a question, when it is not between 1st and 24th of december.
- darkmighty 8y agoJust use little inductive proofs. How many days lie between day 3 and day 37? Is it 37-3=34 or maybe 37-3-1=33? Well, between day 1 and day 3 there is 1 day. By finite induction between day n>3 and day 1, there are n-2 days, and analogously between days n>k>1 there are n-k-1 days.
- lopmotr 8y agoIt's embarrassing but that's what I routinely do when declaring and indexing arrays. I imagine an array with 2 items (index 0 and index 1) and say "that's got length 2 and maximum index 1", so for my length 50 array, the maximum index will be 49. Similarly for intervals and 1-based arrays, etc. All of that talking to myself over and over again! I almost never get off-by-1 errors though. It's a good reason to use iterators instead of for loops.
- smaddox 8y agoI can usually get away with visualizing indices as being just before a memory cell (i.e. on the boundary between cells), whereas lengths are spans of cells. For example: | H | e | l | l | o | Index 0 1 2 3 4 5 Length |<--------5-------->| This makes it easy to visualize that 1-based indexing has indices centered on the memory cell, so calculating a span requires reducing the subtractor by 1.
- gnicholas 8y agoIn college, I noticed that my roommate counted things in chunks of three. I had only ever counted items either individually or in chunks of two, but for most physical items I count, there are fewer than 50 of them, and counting by 3s up to that number is about as easy as counting even numbers. I was surprised to see that visually identifying three of an item was not harder than going by twos. Of course, it's also faster to count by 3 than by 2. I'd be interested to know if others count by 1, 2, 3, or something else. (Another trick I learned working retail is to count out X coins, stack them vertically, and then make more stacks of the same height. Much faster than counting them all out individually!)
- jstimpfle 8y agoMaybe that is because it's very easy to visualize triangulations.
- gnicholas 8y agoPossibly so. But I learned this when we were counting a bookshelf full of DVDs (ah, the early aughts...), so no triangulations there.
- lopmotr 8y agoI count in 3's because that's how I was taught to count newspapers when I was a paper boy. I didn't really question it but you're quite right that it's just as easy to see 3 items as 2, and it's faster. You just have to get used to the sequence but that's much easier than remembering all the multiples of 3. Our brains are great at remembering the next item in a sequence even if we can't randomly access them very well.
- kjeetgill 8y agoI've always counted in 5s, or really more like a 3+2 or 2+2+1. The garden party for me is keeping the number in my head so knowing the last digit is always 0 or 5 makes it easy. Then you just add the remainder at the end. That's roughly how you count change too. Ex: if I were to count 21 items my mental count would be 2,3 [5] 3,2 [10] 2,2,1 [15] 2,3 [20] and 1. [21] Hope that makes sense!
- cecilpl2 8y agoThis is hilarious :)
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoA studio audience would help me score higher on jokes received.
- branchless 8y agoAgreed, not finished it yet, but several very funny bits. "Just so we're on the same page here: you're wrong"!
- amelius 8y agoRelated question: how do ducks count their offspring?
- carapace 8y agoHolographic Reduced Representations
- resource0x 8y agoOnly tangentially related, but it's fascinating how number 12 emerges in music naturally. And the fact that 12 has many divisors is a big coincidence without which Western music as we know it would be impossible. I have a short write-up on this: https://github.com/resource0x/concert0x/blob/master/doodle-script.md#chromatic-scale https://github.com/resource0x/concert0x/blob/master/doodle-s...
- contravariant 8y agoTo the best of my knowledge the divisibility of 12 is rarely used in music. Most chords consist use several different intervals. The popularity of pentatonic music also suggests divisibility isn't unmissable.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- resource0x 8y agoIt's very important in jazz. Diminished scale is all over. Augmented scale, too (e.g T. Monk's tunes). Tritone substitution is the basis of reharmonization (due to 12=6*2). Jazz uses everything (including pentatonic), that's why it's so rich.
- hessenwolf 8y agoSo rich, and sounds like a racket.
- gowld 8y agoAlso: http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/12.html http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mrubinst/tuning/12.html Why do the divisors of 12 matter in music? I'm not aware of anything using the divisors of 12. 12 is mainly important in music because the (3/2)^12 is a power of 2. We divide up the octave into fractions of frequencies, not multiple os steps (a.k.a. fractions of number-of-steps-per-octave). The harmonious way of stepping through the 12 notes is in steps of size [2,2,1,2,2,2,1], which is importantly not by divisors of 12. (Stepping strictly in any arithmetic progression hits at least one low-harmony tone and misses high-harmony tones.). Stepping in the sequence [2,2,1,2,2,2,1] leads to frequency ratios in these low-complexity (==harmonious) fractions: [1 9/8 5/4 4/3 3/2 5/3 15/8 2]
- russdill 8y agoThere are a large number of seximalish systems. Degrees (360), hours, minutes, seconds, am/pm hours, feet/inches, troy ounces, months in a year, etc.
- Asooka 8y agoHuman brains seem to be suited to verbally counting in base ten however. I mean, languages as unconnected as Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, German, English, Navajo all count in base ten. There are of course outliers, but those tend to be very small isolated language communities. I think the ease of communication in base ten for humans outweighs any arithmetic improvements. You can always count things in groups of 12 or 60 if you want to be able to easily divide the group, but keep the numbers in base ten.
- jagger11 8y agoRussian, German and English have the same language root (PIE), the same for Finnish and Hungarian, so it's not an accident.
- jwilk 8y ago> Russian, German and English have the same language root (PIE) Same for Italian. German and English are even more closely related: they are both West Germanic languages.
- yurishimo 8y agoI've heard this before and literally every time I hear it my mind is blown. As a native English speaker, I cannot see any similar patterns between German in English when I happen across random conversations on a site like Reddit in German. But looking at romance languages, I can see more similarities. Maybe it's because of my childhood environment in Texas, where most English speakers learn some basic Spanish by interacting with other people. I would love to see a passage of German that can be intuitively reasoned about by an English speaker with no experience with German solely based on context and perhaps root words. In all honesty I'd probably get confused though. :(
- DoreenMichele 8y agoWritten German and spoken German are somewhat different, just like written and spoken English are. You might find conversational German more legible. There was an episode of Barney Miller where one of the cops was translating for a German woman. At some point she says "Das ist mein bebe." Bebe is pronounced very similar to baby and means the same thing. I can't find a video of just the scene. It is Season 5, Episode 5 The Baby Broker. The Daily Motion has the episode, but it keeps glitching on me. I haven't been able to get to the scene in question. I also used to have German language resources that built on words that were readily understood by English speakers.
- yiyus 8y ago1 is not really a prime factor. But anyway, if you consider it a prime factor for 12, you should consider it a prime factor of 10 too.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoI think that was actually a joke. He surreptitiously only mentioned the prime factors of ten (2 and 5) and then listed all the factors of twelve (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12). Ten, of course, has four factors: 1, 2, 5, 10 and twelve only has two prime factors as well: 2 and 3.
- tehabe 8y agoHow would metric measures work in such a system? Or time?
- tomtimtall 8y agoThe same as decimal metric measures. The reason metric measures play great together is because of what you are counting (units), not the way you write the count down on paper (the numbers representing decimal or decimal or even just lines scratched in wood)
- 11235813213455 8y agothe best system would simply be hexadecimal
- cup-of-tea 8y agoLearning about positional number systems was definitely a challenge but one of the best "mind opening" experiences of my life. I thoroughly recommend reading chapter 4 of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming for the history of counting systems and notation of numbers. I didn't realise how much of what I thought I knew about counting was tied to decimal notation.
- hessenwolf 8y agoI remember my maths teacher teaching that in 1995. He was pretty good at explaining it, but not as good as this video. We should really be seeing a great education dividend from the availability of material these days.
- hessenwolf 8y agoEighths are pretty nice in decimal..
- tomtimtall 8y agoIf you want to build a new counting system, Why not use new symbols for all the numbers? I mean the practicality that 1-9 mean the samme when on their own seem completely eclipsed by the fact that any number represented by more than one symbol means something else. It’s like trying to “build a new better C” where everything works “like you’d expect from C” as long as your program is no more than 4 characters long.