this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 67 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The Base3 arithmetic alone makes me deeply upset

Base36 is where it's at! Super divisibility, 0-Z keyspace, and "10" is a Square that's also the product of two squares.

Plus you can count to "40" (144) on your hands!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (3 children)

How do you count in base36 on your hands? I seem to only have 10 (decimal notation) fingers

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You can count up to 1023 in base 2 using your fingers to represent 0s and 1s.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (3 children)

In theory yes, in practice...fingers don't like cooperating with the combinations of bent and up that you can get by doing that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Yeah, fingers have a strong union.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Speak for yourself

Hypermobility ftw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I do it regularly... I particularly like 4.

In all seriousness, I use it when I need to time something - 32 on one hand means one minute (approximately) with two rotations. I started when trying to determine if my daughter was asleep, waiting for a minute after she'd last moved or talked, and I didn't want a screen or light or noise to wake her (she's always been hard to get to sleep).

So - yeah it's a tiny bit tricky to do some combos, but no more than touch typing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I understand this, but I didn't know how one would count up to 36 the first time around. PhlubbaDubba is using joints in their fingers to get additional objects to increment on. If we only used our fingers, we could only get to 10

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Using your thumbs as pointers, count the joints in your fingers on one hand, that gets you to 12, use the other hand's finger joints to count the thirds within 36, with 4 fingers on the other hand, that's "40"