(no subject)

[chess]

passage (and anyone else who occasionally rants about the decimal system): http://www.dsgb.orbix.co.uk/

Everyone else: http://pixelscapes.com/sailornothing/index.html ((Well, you can go there if you're in the abovenamed group if you like...))

I should write a real entry sometime, but for some reason I really don't have the energy. There are a whole bunch of things I really ought to have written up, and I've put it off for so long I've forgotten about them, which makes me rather demoralised and unlikely to write anything else up. Plus, I keep thinking that I desperately need to write some stories again, but I keep getting busy and uncoordinated. Never mind.

Comments

[passage.livejournal.com]

When you learnt multiplication and division at school I wonder if you noticed that multiplying and dividing by 2,5 and 10 were easier than say 3 or 7.

The reason is that 2,5 and 10 are factors of our base: 10. (The base if of course always easy to multiply in).

What does base 16 give us then? Well only one prime factor actually, 2, so multiplication by 2,4 and 8 is easy. But then it wasn't exactly hard before. So it may work nicely for a computer but for mental arithmetic, it sucks even more direly than base 10.
12 is nice in that it gives us a lot of factors (and handily gives us 3, which is where the base 10 system really falls down -dividing by 3 is hard, but its small and so oughtent to be), 2,3,4,6,12. Nice.

Sadly God in his wisdom only gave man 10 fingers (thumbs inc).

It is one of my long term (and unlikely to be realised) ambitions to write a maths paper in base 12. Of course since it would all be hiding in algebra it's entirely likely that no-one would notice.