5 ms·
Seximal is objectively the best way to represent numbers
- catlover76 3y ago[dead]
- 29athrowaway 3y agoAncient Sumerians and Babylonians used base-60. If we were all polydactyl it would be easier to use base-6.
- rks404 3y agopart of the objectively best criteria is having the funniest name
- ARandomerDude 3y agoSlightly off topic, but this reminds me of why sheet goods like plywood and drywall are 4 ft wide. 4ft = 48" which is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, and 24. This makes math easy and significantly minimizes cutting and waste.
- lmpdev 3y agoI notice target voltages that engineers often pick similarly highly composite integers 3, 9, 12, 24, 48, 56, 72, 96, 480, 600 etc There are many other factors which result in these as well though
- Gibbon1 3y agoIf you ever wonder why resistor values are odd it's because they are logarithmic.
- oakwhiz 3y ago"E series of preferred numbers"
- eternityforest 3y agoI did some research on this for my CSS framework, I didn't want to have a max-h-1rem type value for every single number, just a small subset that is easy to remember. 5-smooth numbers and practical numbers overlap with the highly composite, but include more of the common "Numbers you see everywhere that people seem to like".
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoExcept 5V which is the standard USB voltage (together with 3.3V)
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoIn Europe we are obsessed with anything divisible by 5, so if you made something 48cm long, it would be annoying
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoWe are obsessed with anything divisible by 10, which is our counting base. So a decimal system is most logical. It is highly unfortunate, though, that we used the number of our fingers for that base. Have we gone for the phalanges (sans content then with a thumb) we would end up with 12, divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6. Since we would just use one hand for counting, we would easily end up with 12x12=144 without any effort.
- pcmaffey 3y agoAlso in base 6 all prime numbers > 2 have a last digit of either 1 or 5.
- clipsy 3y agoWhat about 3?
- Anon4Now 3y agoThe older I get, the more I prefer hex. Using hexadecimal, I don't turn 40 until The Beatles start singing about me.
- philiplu 3y agoHeh, I hit that next year. This last birthday, it occurred to me that the Hamming weight (popcount) of my age in years was the largest it would ever get, barring me living to a really unlikely age.
- readthenotes1 3y agoMy granddad just likely had his last [square of unit][unit] birthday
- julianeon 3y agoThis made a pretty good case for finger counting using base 6.
- williamjackson 3y agoIf you give your thumb an absolute value of 5 (or 50, depending on the hand) you can finger count in base 10 all the way to 99!
- Turing_Machine 3y agoIf you use binary, you can count on your fingers up to 1023.
- eternityforest 3y agoIt's like conlanging but for math!
- jacknews 3y agoI completely agree, finger counting makes much more sense, smaller times-tables, etc, but I don't like the naming, using existing numbers, or 1000 groupings. One problem with all these alternative base number systems is they reuse our base-10 digits. To me '10' instinctively means 'ten', '13' is automatically read as thriteen, and so on. They need to use a completely different set of digits (and names) so that you 'feel' the new base, and avoid confusion. There are already proposed names for exponents; "nil", "un", "bi", "tri", "quad", and "pent" - those should be the names of the numbers too, and the exponents should be direct rather than x3, ie "unex" is sixes, bi-ex is 6x6s, tri-ex is 6x6x6s, etc.
- thefz 3y agoSorry, lost any interest at "dozen one".
- RhysU 3y agoI am partial to balanced ternary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary It once made an appearance in a computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun
- gmuslera 3y ago"objectively" and "best" are almost opposites. Best depends on the chosen criteria, and how you weight them. And that selection is subjective. Maybe it works for an alien civilization, or a lost tribe that never had contact with our culture. But for us our culture count, and it is not just how today we represent numbers. And we are closer for a cultural shift for going to hexadecimal than going to seximal. But in any case, if we would go to seximal, I would use a different set of symbols for digits, or at least way to present them.