

Switching from base 10 to base 12 makes a lot of sense - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/duodecimal.html

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petercooper
24 has 2 more factors and could be as easily represented by the alphabet minus
2 letters. A day has 24 hours, there are 24 major and minor keys, and English
could be represented using 24 letters unifying both written language and
numbers in a single system!

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wwortiz
For the title you gave this on HN you sure to present very many reasons as to
why it makes a lot of sense (other than more factors).

I think probably the hardest part for me to learn to count and do math in base
12 would be to use and learn two new symbols to represent 10 and 11.

By the way German also has separate words for eleven and twelve.

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mooism2
Spanish has separate words up to fifteen. French has separate words up to
sixteen.

The linguistic argument for switching is suspect (even setting aside words
such as "twenty" and "hundred").

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1amzave
If high school memories serve, Latin has regular number-names for 11 through
17, but then semi-irregular ones for 18 ( _duodeviginti_ , or "two from
twenty") and 19 ( _undeviginti_ , "one from twenty").

(I say semi-irregular because they're inconsistent with 11 through 17, but at
least consistent with each other, unlike say "eleven" and "twelve", as far as
I can tell.)

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Jabbles
No it doesn't.

For one thing, 12 doesn't have the factor 5. Who says having the factor of 3
is better?

And the whole 10 fingers thing? That might be useful to keep.

I assume the article wasn't meant to be taken literally, but it's hardly high-
quality content, and I'm sure everyone who reads HN knows about non-decimal
based systems.

~~~
jgrahamc
The point is that 12 has more factors than 10 making a lot of everyday
calculations easier.

Sure you lose dividing by 5, but you gain dividing by 3, 4 and 6. Also, you
get nice decimals for common fractions.

 _I assume the article wasn't meant to be taken literally_

I think it makes a lot of sense to use base-12 instead of base-10. Of course,
it'll never happen because it'd be an almost impossible change given the
weight of education and the metric system.

~~~
mooism2
It might have made sense to use base 12 in the first place, but it certainly
doesn't make sense to switch from base 10 to base 12 now.

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corin_
Nothing on the blog itself made me think jgc was making the argument that a
switch would "make a lot of sense", just the title he used on HN (and his
first comment in this thread). That struck me as slightly odd.

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alenlpeacock
I made a little dozenal/decimal online converter, check it out:
<http://flud.org/dozenal-calc.html>

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drallison
Heinlein argued for base 60. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal>

