this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle

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[–] DrQuint@lemmy.world 54 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (39 children)

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.

[–] cantsurf@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Care to elaborate on how base 12 would be better than base 10 in this case?

[–] sf1tzp@programming.dev 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’ve heard before it’s because 1/3 can be represented as a whole number.

Just like feet, which can have 12 inches. But if we want to get more precise we start cutting inches into eighths for some reason 😅

[–] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

old school carpenters' squares also have inches divided in 12.

[–] LukeMedia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I always use decimal inches wherever possible, personally. Makes so much more sense to me than "3/64" or some crap like that

[–] biddy@feddit.nl 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A base 12 metric system is the best of all worlds. 1/3 of a cm is 0.4cm or 4.

Your way seems like the worst of all worlds. What is 0.1 feet in inches? shrugs. If you're going to use a different system to the people around you, why not use normal metric?

[–] LukeMedia@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I said decimal inches, not decimal feet. Also, I use them personally with my own projects, not when giving measurements to other people. 4.25 inches makes more sense to me than 4 1/4 inches. I could use cm but I'm more used to inches since I live in the US. If I were to give my measurements to someone else I'd use fractions, since that is the standard here.

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