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While I live in Europe and I do agree, imagine how nice would it be if the entire world used the duodecimal system today for everything, i.e. 100 was preceded b
by aldanor 7y ago
While I live in Europe and I do agree, imagine how nice would it be if the entire world used the duodecimal system today for everything, i.e. 100 was preceded by BB (143). Greeks and Shumers were smart guys - 12 has 4 divisors (excluding itself and 1) while 10 has only 2. Same story with 100 and 144, etc.
- londons_explore 7y agoHaving spent a lot of time recently digging around memory dumps, I'm getting pretty good at hexadecimal mental arithmetic, and it certainly seems like a superior system.
- Tepix 7y agoBase 12 is not base 16
- Armisael16 7y agoBase 16 would be even worse than base 10. It isn’t a highly divisible number, so lots of common fractions aren’t clean hexadecimals. In base 12 you get 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8. Base 12 gets you 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, and 1/9.
- londons_explore 7y agoBut being a power of 2 I think has a massive advantage. There is also an advantage to have a chain of the square roots lead to 2. That leaves 4, 16, and 256. 16 seems most sensible of those. You'd end up with a number system where everything is a sum of halvings and doublings, which is conceptually much simpler. Sure, you can't represent a third neatly, but I don't consider that a very important property.