At 9 December 2002, 04:09 PM, Ma Be wrote:
Jim Elwell wrote:Sorry, Marcus, but there is NOTHING magic about the number 10. If we had grown up with 12 fingers, and had a numbering system based on 12 (e.g., extracting from hexadecimal: 0, 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11...), it would appear every bit as "natural" as decimal does to us now. Our brains would be very comfortable with it, and using an "odd" number like 10 for a base would seem weird and uncomfortable.
>Just imagine: if humans were born with six fingers on each hand (perhaps
>two opposable thumbs), or 12 fingers total, then:
>P.S. don't take this seriously -- this is just a bit of daydreaming
>
?? 'Nightmaring' would be much more like it!... :-( Looks like one keeps forgetting that it would take a lot more than just 12 fingers to make us "comfortable" in the base-12! (Our brains! For some reason, they simply do NOT work well in any other base but *pure* decimal! God certainly knew what He was doing... ;-) )
Imagine someone used to base-12, where 1/3 = 0.4. Then you tell him that in decimal 1/3 = 0.33333..... and he would say "What a crummy system!!!"
For those of us who have spent years working in binary, octal and hexadecimal, this is pretty obvious. "10" is special through familiarity, not due to anything else.
Jim Elwell, CAMS
Electrical Engineer
Industrial manufacturing manager
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
www.qsicorp.com
