Jim Elwell said:- | Just finished Ken Alder's book, The Measure of All Things. A very | interesting and informative read, certainly *not* anti-metric in any way. | Learned a bit more French from from it, too. | One issue got me thinking: some professions wanted a measurement standard | based on 12, so that things could be easily divided into halves, quarters, | thirds, etc. | Just imagine: if humans were born with six fingers on each hand (perhaps |two opposable thumbs), or 12 fingers total, then: |* "decimal" would mean base-12
Mike says:- When I was a programmer back in the dark days of steam computing, we had to think 'hex', and most of our calculations were done with base 16. And that was before electronic calculators - we had special sliding rulers with holes in them to pick the desired digit - 16 holes for addition and 16 for subtraction. Yes, it would have been nice to have been born with 8 fingers on each hand... Mike
