this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
2891 points (97.0% liked)

Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle

7153 readers
1 users here now

A community dedicated to Strange Planet comics by Nathan W. Pyle.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] p1mrx 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

if we all started counting in base12 too

You could start by calling it twelve instead of 12.

[–] duffman 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To keep things as simple/intuitive as they are today, we'd need two new symbols to represent the additional numbers. 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,§,∆,10

Of course it would be confusing as all hell for anyone alive today.

[–] stewsters 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

With hexadecimal we typically use a-f for the remaining numbers. We probably would use something like this for base 12:

012345679ab

Of course everyone knows the correct base to use is 2. Or as we call it, base 10.

Actually, come to think of it, it would always be 10 in the base that it is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, 10 can be any number if you change the base. Non-integer bases are weird, but a few (like base φ) see some use.