Sometimes I just need to get words to text, and I’ve never made use of the many outlets for that sort of desire before. Often, most of my ideas and thoughts have either gone unsaid, or been mentioned only to my long-suffering girlfriend. She is far less excited about certain common thoughts that keep running about in my head. As an example, the easiest way to irritate her now is to mention a Base-12 number system. I find Base-10 to be a wholly unfortunate numerical system. The whole common system of numbers we use is based off of counting our fingers.
My gripe with Base-10 lies mostly in how utterly unremarkable a number 10 is (as an aside, yes I do know I choose words and phrasings poorly). It has very similar properties to 14. Both numbers are divisible by only two primes, one of them being 2. Both are adjacent, or at least near other, far more interesting numbers. Ten is adjacent to both a prime, and a power of a prime. Fourteen is adjacent to another prime, and close to the first power of a power of a prime (power tower). I find it a damn shame that we don’t have six fingers to a hand. It would be way more aesthetically pleasing, as powers of 12 are evenly divisible by far more numbers than powers of 10 are. For example, the last digits of consecutive square numbers follow a 0,1,4,9,4,1 pattern in base 12. Compare that to the uglier version from base 10: 0,1,4,9,6,5,6,9,4,1.
On a side note, trying to do arithmetic in a different base system is a bitch. Try multiplying 17(in base 12) by 13(in base 12) in base 12 in your head and give the answer in base 12
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