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Comment by jxdxbx | Hacker News Reader

The metric systems's worse flaw was doubling down on base 10 instead of the plainly superior base 12.

Only in certain fields. For most interactions divide by 10 is far easier than divide by 12, and you'd end up with far, far more "eyeballed" measurements.

So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.

Or you'd have to go all in and write numbers in base 12 too, then dividing by 12 would be easier...

Yes, I think we should be all in on base 12. 10 is just the arbitrary number of fingers we have. Poor choice! 12 is much more composite.

I hope you're comfortable with changing literally every number in society to base 12. My house cost $42A765_12. My SSN is 399-AA-5866 and phone number is (289) 257-B84A. The distance to the moon is actually 50A693_12 feet. I used the additional symbols A and B as per usual notation, but it's okay if society agrees on some other symbols for the extra two digit values.

If you don't make the base of the number system agree with the base used for converting between units, then conversion becomes so much harder. For example, it's not immediately apparent that 204 inches is 17 feet, but it is immediately apparent that 204 cm is 2.04 m. Furthermore, when the base disagrees with conversion factors, you run into issues like variable-length fields - like, "2ft 9in", "2ft 10in" (notice the inches transitions from one digit to two digits).

Yes I am literally a member of the dozenal society

Obviously base 60 is superior to all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9m2jck1f90

Possibly yes. But every implementation of base-60 I've ever seen is actually implemented as alternating base-6 and base-10.

A true base-60 would have 60 unique symbols for the different digital values, much like how in our set of ten digits {0123456789}, none of the symbols have any rhyme or pattern with respect to the others.

Good luck memorizing the ~1800 entries of the base-60 multiplication table.

The right time to fix that mistake wasn't in metric, it was while creating our numbering system.

Base 12? That's a small number. Now base 13? 13's a big number. The biggest number, perhaps. That's what they're saying at least. Base 13, 13 colonies, now that's America.

The PDF standard uses base 85 encoding (Ascii 85).

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

Someone else must be paying for your fuel. Nobody who pays for their own fuel likes that.

This can make sense for currency, but units of weight and distance and so on are infinitely divisible. You can just have a third of a metre if you like. Or 333 mm if the inaccuracy is acceptable. And so on.

And it's not like 1 is some special value. If you start from a base of 120cm you get enough even divisions that you rarely run into the need for fractions

Unless everyone worked in base 12 numbers too, that'd be a mess. Part of the beauty of metric is how often calculations devolve to shifting the decimal point.

And nothing really prevents metric system from working in base-12. Ofc base 12 kilometre would be larger than base-10. But it still would work.

Base 10 really is used because our number system is base 10. And more so base 1000. Apart from some cultures.

As long as we count in base 10, it makes sense for the unit system to also be based on base 10.

As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.

Too bad there are 11 players on the pitch, otherwise US could switch entirely to the football fields measurement system.

Isn't base 10 easier because you just add/remove zeros, and also we have 10 fingers to count..?

No, converting units is not a useful exercise. airplanes are measured in mm - even the full length is in mm not decameters or even hecameters (i had to look those prefixes up, spellcheck doesn't even know the word, but I think they are correct)

Vehicle drawings (maybe mechanical engineering in general) might be in millimetres, but a lot of civil engineering works in metres, so when designing some bit of infrastructure to fit certain kinds of vehicles, I do need to convert between the two, and the easier, the better.

Being able to count using fingers is more valuable than having one more prime factor.

You can actually count to 12 on your fingers using one hand. Use the thumb as a pointer, then for each of your other fingers you have three joints. So 3*4=12.

Or use a hand as a 5-bit integer, then you can count to 31 :)

It's hard to actually count using more than 4 bits/hand though. The quickest methods that require the least dexterity are those that count the knuckles (which are actually used in some counting traditions, unlike binary finger-counting).

If you include the tip, you can do base 16.

Let’s go hexadecimal all the way.

No. Base 16 is only divisible by 1, 2, 4, and 8, while Base12 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. Of course, Base 10 is only divisible by 1, 2, and 5.

Switching from Base 10 to Base 12 would be difficult. Instead we should go back in time and ensure we evolve with 6 fingers on each hand and foot.

This is an excellent compromise

This is why men are superior to women, we can always count to one higher. (or two including the tip, as someone suggested with the fingers) :-p ducks

But all the techniques to multiply numbers with your fingers are more confusing in base 12.

https://www.wikihow.com/Multiply-With-Your-Hands

Those techniques can be useful. If you add toes, multiplying numbers up to 20 (like 16x18) is easy.

Consider marking it with /s next time.

Lol sure, in no A0 years!

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