this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
154 points (97.0% liked)
Damn, that's interesting!
4725 readers
1 users here now
- No clickbait
- No Racism and Hate speech
- No Imgur Gallery Links
- No Infographics
- Moderator Discretion
- Repost Guidelines
- No videos over 15 minutes long
- No "Photoshopped" posts
- Image w/ text posts must be sourced in comments
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And 1/3 of 100 is 33.3333333333333. There are strong arguments for a base 12 number system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal), and some folks have already put together a base 12 metric system for it. 10 is really quite arbitrary if you think about it. I mean we only use it because humans have 10 fingers, and it's only divisible by 5 and 2.
That said, the best argument for sticking with base 10 metric is that it's well established. And base 10 time would make things more consistent, even if it has some trade offs.
Ancient central Americans used a base 12 number system and counted on their fingers using finger segments (3 per finger, 4 fingers, 12 segments). Makes fractions way more intuitive
I will always up vote base12 superiority posts