Astro Hacker News - The Duodecimal Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 1, Year 1209 [pdf]

Cosi1125 |next [-]

On page ↋: "Did you ever wonder just what the number system would be like if man had been created with 12 fingers?" (and an illustration).

With the advent of modern AI tools, this question has never been more important.

nephihaha |root |parent [-]

Okay, that DID make me laugh out loud.

nephihaha |next |previous [-]

This is for people who think Esperanto is too successful. I was amazed to see pictures of women in there, since there are none among the directors or writers...

I bet that annual meeting they held in that wee room back in 1983 was riveting.

Skwid |next |previous [-]

I'm more of a seximal man myself: https://www.seximal.net/

xg15 |root |parent |next [-]

There better be some deep, decades-long feud between the Duodecimal and the Seximal Society, or I'm very disappointed.

(Of course any squabbling is instantly forgotten the moment they have to act against their common arch enemy, the Hexadecimal Society)

xg15 |root |parent [-]

(And then there is the Sexagesimal Society. We don't talk about the Sexagesimal Society.)

adrian_b |root |parent [-]

Yes, bases 12 or 6 bring only a negligible improvement over base 10, which is entirely due to the fraction 1/3 being more frequently encountered in practice than the fraction 1/5.

When the exact representation of frequently used rational numbers is irrelevant, base 2 has no competition.

If you want to represent exactly more rational numbers than with bases 2 or 10, than either base 30 shall be used (= 2 * 3 * 5) or bases that are multiples of 30, like the traditional 60 or like 240, which fits well in a byte.

Aardwolf |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Base 16 (or base 10, as they would call it) is the perfect base: http://www.intuitor.com/hex/

Skwid |root |parent |next [-]

I'm standing my ground on optimal base, but I will absolutely be using those hex pronounciations in future

rep_lodsb |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The "dividing things by two" argument makes a lot of sense! And if you need ⅓ and ⅕, they aren't too bad either: .5555 and .3333 repeating.

nephihaha |root |parent |previous [-]

Sexagesimal (Base 60) is the way to go. Plenty of history behind it and can handle much larger numbers than decimal.

nephihaha |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Jan Misali! My comment about Esperanto above wasn't far off. Toki Pona... The Newspeak of auxlangs.

mgr86 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Wow, they throw some serious spars at these duodecimal people:

> the problem is that Latin uses base ten, so bases larger than ten end up with names that put a bit too much of an emphasis on their relationship with decimal: undecimal, duodecimal, tridecimal, etc. people who like base twelve like to call it "dozenal" instead of "duodecimal" for this exact reason. these names are simply too biased in decimal's favor. ideally, every base should have a unique name that reflects its properties, rather than trivial information about its size.

scythe |root |parent |previous [-]

An advantage of seximal is that it takes a lot less time to memorize the times table: there are only ten "nontrivial" entries, whereas in base ten you have 36.

hermitcrab |next |previous [-]

12 is, in many ways, a better base than 10 (divisible by 2,3,4 and 6 vs 2 and 5). And it was used in many British/Imperial units. But the chance of the world moving existing systems from base 10 to base 12 is surely so close to 0 as makes no difference?

ahazred8ta |root |parent |next [-]

In premodern engineering they used twelfths. The foot ', inch '', line ''', and point '''' were each 1/12th of the previous unit. (Yes, they used quad prime marks.) European typographic points were 1/144th of an inch. https://dozenal.org/

borgesat |root |parent |previous [-]

Yes, but hexadecimal eight-bit computing introduces the octet as specifying information protocol (255.255.255.255) addresses.

zokier |root |parent [-]

Hexadecimal would be 4-bit computing, not 8-bit.

k2enemy |next |previous [-]

And to think, people are concerned that humans will struggle to find meaning in life after the AI utopia obviates the need for work.

nephihaha |root |parent [-]

"Obviates the need for work"

More like the need for workers and that is a problem.

rep_lodsb |next |previous [-]

The dozenal movement seems based (no pun intended) mostly on opposition to the metric system.

The article on page 38 is really funny to anyone not in the US:

    Fahrenheit temperature usually ranges from about 0° (cold) to about 100°
    (hot). On the other hand, those who use the awkward Celsius scale usually range from
    about 18° to about 38°! Interesting.

(18-22 °C is room temperature, 38 °C = 100 °F = hot summer day. 0 °F is way below freezing, a lot colder than it gets in most places!).

And apparently only the metric system was imposed by tyrannical governments. Maybe someone could ask the people in metric countries today if they would like to go back to the "natural" measurements that were in use before that happened? And maybe also switch to counting everything in dozen and gross at the same time.

Even if that really were objectively a better system, I think few would make that change if it wasn't forced on them.

madmoose |root |parent [-]

There's nothing "natural" about the Fahrenheit scale either. Fahrenheit took the Rømer scale, multiplied it by 4 and rounded it off a bit.

greenbit |next |previous [-]

The best base, and I think everyone can agree, has and always will be 10, regardless of one's radix persuasion.

xg15 |next |previous [-]

What's the deal with that upside-down 2 on the title page? I first thought it would be one of the two additional digits, but those are visible on the "clock face" circle on the first page and look nothing like it.

(or are upside-down digits their way to mark icky base-10 numbers if they have to write them?)

Edit: ah, they explain it on page 23.

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Malic |next |previous [-]

I feel obliged to drop the School House Rock video/song “Little Twelve Toes” here. It’s the earliest exposure to alternative counting systems for me.

https://youtu.be/7m3AHBu93OE

omnicognate |next |previous [-]

1209 is 2025, to answer the first question I had.

ithkuil |root |parent |next [-]

I have a t-shirt with a jack o lantern with a Xmas hat with this text:

31 Oct is 25 Dec

kps |root |parent [-]

This year also US Thanksgiving.

ithkuil |root |parent [-]

Neat! Too bad "nov" is not a canonical abbreviation of nonary ("non" is)

rep_lodsb |root |parent |previous [-]

"In 1193 (1981.), I submitted my first article [...] and in 1197 (1987.), I became a member"

Seems obviously wrong, or is that yet another dozenal notation, where what looks like the digit three is really a one? Because it should have been real easy to avoid mistakes like that for an entire decade by just remembering that 1190 = 1980 decimal (next time the decades and dozen-years align like that will be in 2040).

isotropy |next |previous [-]

So…if we had already been using a base-12 counting system when metric came along, we would have the best of both worlds.

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seanalltogether |previous [-]

The upside down 2 and 3 to represent 10 and 11 look really dumb. Feels like a lazy solution rather then extending the character set with something interesting or unique.

volemo |root |parent |next [-]

Although I too dislike upside down “2” because it looks too much like “5”.

greenbit |root |parent [-]

My hot take on that was "upside down 2? Nah, must be a really stylized 7"

volemo |root |parent |previous [-]

The upside down 6 to represent nine is really dumb. Those decimal evangelists are so lazy!

nephihaha |root |parent [-]

Yeah, that's bad enough.