On Dec 22, 2005, at 11:21 AM, Max Battcher wrote:
Robert J. Chassell wrote:
I am curious, because of my fury that in the Middle Ages, Christian
Europe adopted an Indian/Arabic base 10 numerical system rather than
the better base 12 system. Base 12 fits the number of Christian
Apostles. It fits the number of eggs in dozen. In base 12, you can
count on one hand.
As a person who has had to work across radixes it is much easier to
deal with radixes that are powers of two (binary, base 4, octal,
hexadecimal) than any other arbitrary base. There's a reason
computers use binary or unary.
Base 12 sounds ridiculous, and all the more ridiculous for your
religious ranting and racism.
Every base system is ridiculous and arbitrary, religious ranting and
racism notwithstanding.
Case in point: express the (extremely common) quantity 1/10 exactly
in binary...
Wikipedia, that knower of all things knowable, correct or not, goes
on and on and on and on about number bases at http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Numeral_system and on about a billion pages linked from it in
the right-hand column.
Dave
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