1086
Time is math I think (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/mathmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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[–] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

12 has more divisibles than 10.

12, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1

10, 5, 2, 1

Some suspect 12 was picked because you can more easily divide up into more useful time chunks.

Edit: you wrote this in your comment and I missed it somehow.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Then why don't we use a base 12 counting system instead?

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    We used to. It's called a dozen

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's not really base 12, it's just a special name for the decimal number 12.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It is now, but it used to be part of a base 12 system. 12 is a dozen, a dozen dozen is a gross, and dozen gross is a great gross.

    There was some rough times as it switched to decimal and you wind up with bullshit like the 'long hundred' being 10 dozen and a short hundred being 10 tens.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Fair enough.

    I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren't writing things down so much in the 1500's and maybe there were characters for those numbers.

    I wonder if that's why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn't have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means 'two left' after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means 'ten more than three').

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    It really is like that. Some people used to count with their fingers differently than we do now. They counted with the thumb on one hand, with each finger beginning (i.e. where the finger is connected to the hand) and each knuckle having a value. In total, with four fingers you get 4x3=12, which is where the expression ‘a dozen’ comes from. The other hand was used to count how many times you did this; strangely enough, with the fingers as we know them. So you could count up to 60.

    At least that's how I learnt it at some point. If anyone has more information on this, please let us know!

    Incidentally, I find the binary counting method with the fingers more interesting, where you can count up to 1023 with ten fingers.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Huh, that actually makes some sense. How would it be written, I guess spoken you could easily go "eleven dozen and seven", presumably you would need another symbol for 10/11. Write it as B7 if you wanted to use A/B similar to how you would use A-F with hexadecimal.

    Probably take some time to get used to it from being used to using decimal.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The "eleven dozen and seven" is functionally no different from "One hundred and thirty-nine." We'd just have 2 more characters than we do now.

    We even have a name for a third digit in base-12. 12 dozen is a "gross".

    The Babylonians used base 60, which is neat because it cleanly divides by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30, whereas base 10 has just 2 and 5.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Dozens, but not tens of something. I like English.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    you can say tens of something, i don't see an issue with that grammatically speaking.

    "tens of thousands" literally derives from that phrasing even. similar to other weird anomalies like "ten hundred" which likely comes from "ten hundreds" for example

    Technically speaking, any sort of arbitrarily defined grouping used in any numeral system can be used like this. For example 2^n would be relevant when discussing binary counting. You might refer to binary number groups as powers as a result.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    I think some cultures used it. We use the base 10 mainly because of our 10 fingers but if you start counting with 0 (counting the closed fist) you could easily count to 12 with your hands as well.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Base 12 or base 8 would make me so happy.

    But if could be worse. Imagine a universe where some idiot established base 7 or base 13.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A base prime would quiet my OCD 😓

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It gets triggered by divisors?

    I almost would have expected the opposite. Though I get that you can't control it in any way.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    For all the sense it makes... If it can be divided into a non prime. it is bad. Bad time, bad day, bad week, bad month, bad year... If I'm anxious it's temperature and number of steps I took to arrive at my last destination

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    we do, it's literally the imperial system.

    If you want a real answer, it's probably to do with arabic numerals being a base ten system, then being adopted globally, after the standardization of a base 12 in isolation for something like time. Arabic numerals specifically probably resulting from us often having 10 fingers, so it's a natively intuitive system from that aspect. Though representing numbers from other systems (like base 12) in systems like base 10, isn't hard, so most often, we just don't really think of them existing in base 12 (like time does) since we think in base 10 most of the time.

    Ask someone who has dealt with the binary system about this, and they will tell you the exact same thing. Even people experienced with binary counting logic still natively translate it to base 10 because it's more intuitive that way. It's one of the reasons that the doubling of possibilities every additional bit is a relevant discussion. Technically in the frame of binary, you're just adding one more place value, however due to how binary works, and how base 10 works, it's a rather disconnected counting system (base 10 has a lot more redundant uses of numbers, binary is mathematically perfect)

    It's the same reason why different parts of the world speak different languages with different grammar rules, shit's weird, and sometimes it doesnt get adopted logically.

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