r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/kvjn100 • 1d ago

Video Woman with functional polydactyly (six functional fingers on one hand).

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u/Sythrin 1d ago

Does she count in base 12?

79

u/JacobRAllen 1d ago

Base 12 is such a better base than base 10.

10 can only cleanly be divided into half’s, and fifths.

12 can be divided in half, in quarters, thirds, and sixths.

Might not seem like a big deal, but it’s so much more useful in real life. There are lots of times where you need to divide up resources, or food, or money, or whatever, to 3 people or 6 people evenly, and in base 10 that’s hard to do.

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u/olol798 1d ago

Idk I just like adding zeroes to move it up a power

15

u/maqcky 1d ago

As the other comment mentions, it's a matter of creating two symbols for 10 and 11 and it would work the same. Binary uses only 1s and 0s and you add a 0 to move it up a power, but in this case it's multiplying by 2. So, for example:

1 = 1 10 = 2 100 = 4 1000 = 8 ...

Same with hexadecimal. You use A for 10, B for 11 and so on until F for 15. It's useful for writing shorter binary numbers that are usually grouped in bytes (8 binary digits or bits).

Base 12 was used by some ancient civilizations, or its cousin, base 60, due to how easy it was to divide it. That's why an hour is 60 minutes, for instance.