Base 8 is pretty naff IMHO. 8's prime factors are 2×2×2, so the only nice patterns it can represent involve twos, fours and eights; but we can already do that

Base 8 is pretty naff IMHO. 8's prime factors are 2×2×2, so the only nice patterns it can represent involve twos, fours and eights; but we can already do that using binary, so it's rather a waste of factors. Base 8 is useful as a 'compact notation' for binary (hence why it's easy to convert); along with base 16, base 24, base 32, base 64, etc. Even then, I prefer hexadecimal over octal. If we change one of octal's factors to a 3 we get base 2×2×3 = 12, which can represent patterns involving twos, threes, fours, sixes, eights and twelves. That's a lot more 'bang for the buck' than octal. Dozenal is still 'wasteful' by having two factors of 2. If we get rid of one we get seximal, which can represent patterns involving twos, threes, fours and sixes. In that sense, dozenal almost a 'compact notation' for seximal, but not as easy to convert as octal<->binary; we get easy conversion for base 36, base 216, etc. but they seem unwieldy. The next meaningful jump up from seximal/dozenal is base 2×3×5 = 30, which also seems unwieldy. Dropping the factor of 3 gives us decimal that we all know and hate ;) > And we can count using fingers! Just discard thumbs! They are not standard anyway. We can count dozenal on one hand, using the finger joints. Our non-standard thumbs can be useful for pointing at the joints.