Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Hizonner 1867 days ago
60 is a better base than 12. Even 30 would be better.

And we should drop the stupid Earth-centric metric system and go to some kind of Planck units.

3 comments

Base sixty would be much worse for humans. There are too many digits to memorize, and the multiplication table is enormous. It does give you a factor of 5, but 5 is only so common because we use base ten.

Base twelve is better than thirty because you can represent 1/4 (0.3) and 3/4 (0.9) with a single digit.

We do, for physics. Very often c is treated as 1. The "meter" is really just a conveniently human-scaled unit, equivalent to the "degree" in trigonometry.
> 60 is a better base than 12.

And it proved itself useful on this Earth for probably longer than the decimal system.