🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • This is not even slightly true.

    Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.

    There is literally nothing “natural” about base 10. Indeed it’s not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.













  • I don’t even know how to respond to this.

    Kirk’s complaint is at the top. Not only is English read from left to right, but it’s also read TOP TO BOTTOM. This fact has been used all over the place in writing, including in comics:

    (So ubiquitous is this format that I literally just popped a comic I was in the process of reading up onto my screen and there it was in one of the frames! I didn’t have to go searching.)

    You’ll also see it in advertising, in some books with fancier formatting, and a whole bunch of other places.

    So remember not only “left to right” but “top to bottom” and you’ll do fine.