Comment by asimpletune
1 year ago
If society were tasked one day with reinventing standards and units, it doesn't matter why, what do you think are some things they would change?
For example, I think for human counting, base 12 is about as easy as base 10, but gives good ways to express division by 3, in addition to division by 2 or 4. It also fits better with how we count time, like how there are 60 seconds in a minute, 12 months in a year, etc... but I imagine those might be revised as well.
Anyways, I'm curious to hear what others think.
I think there's an argument for base 16 over 12. It's very slightly worse than base 12 for purely human use, since it's only divisible into halves, quarters and eighths. However, each hex digit maps to an exact number of binary digits, which I think outweighs the benefit of thirds and sixths in a digital world.
Of course, it's all theoretical, because there's no chance this would ever happen short of an apocalypse that takes us back to the stone age, and unless the radiation gives us 12 or 16 fingers, we'd probably just reinvent decimal.
To be honest I'm not a fan, time is cumbersome to do any sort of addition or subtraction to get exact days/hours/minutes (not to mention timezones etc).
Compare to metric units, always base 10 and always easy to convert mm to cm to m and so on.
Now that we live in a digital world - why do we consistently reinvent date/time libraries? To me that's proof enough the concepts are just hard to work with and over a long span of time verify your calculation is correct.
None of those issues with date and time are anything to do with the base, they're to do with date and time as defined by humans being inherently complicated concepts. Specifically, trying to have a single measurement "fit" for a load of different purposes.
If we had based our system around base 12, a base 12 version of the metric system would be just as easy to work with as metric is in decimal, with the added bonus that you can divide powers of the base (10, 100, 1000, etc.) into quarters, thirds and sixths without needing a decimal place, and thirds of 1 would be non-repeating.