Wait, here I've been thinking the alphabet has 26 letters all this time?
(double checks keyboard)
(double checks keyboard)
You really only have 18 fingers and toes when you think about it - 10 toes + 8 fingers.
Those other two appendages are thumbs. Even my kids know this.
EDIT: You also have two sets of knees - your low knees, and your high knees.
The low knees were the ones you pat with both hands in that song. (Your ordinary knees.)
Since they knew that song I taught them that they actually had two sets of knees, low knees and high knees (hiney, LOL). When I asked them to pat their knees they would use both hands to pat their (low) knees and then reach up behind and pat their high knees (hineys). The best part was that they would announce which knees they were patting. Pretty funny for me helping my toddlers attain true enlightenment.
I thought it was funny. My wife didn't at first but everyone who knows me understood why it worked out this way.
I kept on the message that they only had 8 fingers too in the hopes that they would argue with their teachers about it and win by showing those teachers that two of those digits are actually thumbs. I made sure they understood that they have 10 digits but only 8 of them are fingers, the other two are thumbs. Ha ha, whose the smartest now, teacher?
26 * 2 + 10 = 62, almost 64
(26 + 1) * 2 + 10 = 64
I wonder what the history is behind why base-64 encoding became so widespread. Sadly I can even recognise certain sequences now without having to decode them. But the fact it's not even safe for use in URLs/filenames (due to + and /) would suggest it's not really fit for purpose (and yes I know base64-url encoding exists, I once had to write code that had to deal with strings that could use either encoding, and you could only tell by looking for the presence of _ or -. Certainly that _ was not originally chosen as one the extra 2 characters needed on top of A-Za-z0-9 for full encoding is a bit baffling. "-" is often used as delimeter though - my other pick would have been #.)
J, U, and W are sometimes considered pretenders. Late additions, at least.
J is just a stylized I. U is a variation of V. W is of course just a double U.
G is also a relatively recent entry, if you go back to the Romans from which the Latin/English alphabet is derived.