• DrQuint@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.

    Those aliens have 6 fingers. It’s an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.

    • bouh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Base 10 is the most easy to scale, you just move the coma and add 0s. Base 12 doesn’t allow that easily

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Yep. In computer science you sometimes need to calculate with hexadecimal numbers where 10-15 are the letters A-F. You just use another factor for scaling “easily”.

          In hexadecimal 10 is 16 in decimal. So if you do C * 10 it’s C0 but that is 192 in decimal (12 * 16, remember the base is 16).

          Whats cool though is that (all hexadecimal):

          10 / 2 = 8

          10 is 2 to the power of 4 which means 10 is divisible by 2 4 times.

          Similarly (and arguably even cooler) with a base 12 system 10 is divisible by 2 AND 3!

          10 / 3 = 4
          10 / 2 = 6