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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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/
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.
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?)
"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).
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.
With the advent of modern AI tools, this question has never been more important.
I bet that annual meeting they held in that wee room back in 1983 was riveting.
(Of course any squabbling is instantly forgotten the moment they have to act against their common arch enemy, the Hexadecimal Society)
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.
> 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.
More like the need for workers and that is a problem.
The article on page 38 is really funny to anyone not in the US:
(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.
(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.
https://youtu.be/7m3AHBu93OE
31 Oct is 25 Dec
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).