this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
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A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.
Those aliens have 6 fingers. It's an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.
Care to elaborate on how base 12 would be better than base 10 in this case?
Basically it's because 12 is more divisible than 10. Factors of 10 are 1,2,5 and 10. 12 has 1,2,3,4,6 and 12. This gives more flexibility when discussing numbers. Our time is technically using base 12, which is why we can say quarter past 4 and it means a traditional whole number. That's the argument I've heard anyway
I believe this is also why we have 360 "degrees" in a circle, and not 365. The ancients hated that a year was clise to, but not exactly, 365 days. They chalked it up to the imperfection of Earth relative to the heavens. But a perfect year should be 360 days because it is divisible by every single digit number but 7.
On the matter of days in a years, there's also the idea of spliting the year into 13 months of 28 days each for a total of 364 days, closer matching the lunar cycle (and women's body). Every day of the year would always be on the same day of the week.
Then the extra day? It's world day, a global holiday for celebrating the new year, and it doesn't belong in any weekday. Sometimes we'd need an extra leap year day (just like right now with 29th February) so they would just both be world day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Check for pros and cons.
I'm very much in favor of the 13 month system. So hard to change such things now that we don't have emperors.*
*I'm also very much in favor of not having emperors though...
The ancients actually used a 360 day calendar and a bonus week of 5-6 days at the end before the new year started.