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Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

It's in the article. SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!

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Also, as a cousin comment alludes to, for there to be one of the above supernovae, there will also be a supernova named SN2067iamsoverystupidoopssorry and a SN2067thisnamingschemawasabadidea

I guess we’re already hitting four letter words, was there a supernova “butt” last year?

No, but there was an "AHOY" https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2024ahoy

No, but this is close: https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2024ass

That is unfortunate. With only two prime factors, one of which being 13, base 26 is even worse than base 10, and it doesn't even have anatomical coincidence to recommend it. Much better to use base 36 -- we have a ready made character set for it by simply adding the digits to the 26 alphabetic characters. This gives us many more integer prime factors. Not as good as base 60, but better than base 26 and finger numbers.

Why the assumption that base36 would use the western alphabet. If they use Cyrillic, they'd have 33 chars. If they use Japanese, they'd have 46 chars. Using Hindi, they'd have 50 chars.

https://wordfinderx.com/blog/languages-ranked-by-letters-in-...

I have no clue as to the accuracy of this website, but accuracy isn't something we strive for when making ridiculous comments on the interwebs, is it?

Well, the assumption was based on the fact that they chose base 26, and that the "26" came from the use of a 26 character alphabet. The 10 Arabic numerals are then a convenient character set to expand to 36, which is a much nicer number base than 26.

Japanese could be combined with the Hindi character set to yield base 96, which is fairly convenient. Cyrillic would be harder -- perhaps the best options there would be to drop a character to yield base 32, or perhaps 3 characters to yield base 30.

I'd argue that base 60 is probably the optimal number base for nearly any use (with base 16 or 64 as close second and third for working with binary data). Hindi's 50 characters combined with our 10 Arabic numerals could indeed be a great way to get there.

As per the post:

> That’s one hundred billion supernovae per century, or a billion per year, or about 30 per second.

7 characters of base26 gives you 8 billion combinations. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" requires ~1e48 events when going by the actual non base26 scheme. So I wouldn't be worried.

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