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[Frumple]

Pretty often, yeah. Tends to be how I manage low number multiplication for 9, too.

[Reelya]

Base ten is best until such a point we grow extra fingers, really. If you can't finish off your base without taking your shoes off or reusing digits you've already screwed up.

They have a system where you put your thumb against the segments of your other fingers, there are 12 of those. Count up to 12 on one hand, it's clearly better than needing both hands to count to 10. If you use both thumbs with this, then your left hand counts 12's and the right hand counts 1's, allowing keeping track of up to 144 with 2 hands, no toes needed.

Hell, this way of keeping track beats the normal way even if you don't switch to base-12: with your thumbs as markers you can keep track of any 2-digit number in either base-10 or base-12 just with hand positions that actually put less strain on the hand than the normal counting-to-10 thing.

It's entirely down to what people are taught. If some people grew up with base 12 and were told you count on finger segments that way they'd argue that base-12 is clearly the natural base since we have that many segments available for counting.

[delphonso]

I started doing this when I was asked to keep track of 20+ errors in a 2 minute reading recording (English instruction). I have to say it is a lot more convenient

[feelotraveller]

Sort of lose the high profile visibility of things like 'how many fingers am I holding up?' though.  Or again the clearly visible countdown from ten that takes place, for example, with cycling time trials.

Always thought that 19 months of 19 days would be a neat system (plus 4ish holy-days) - ya know, fuck the moon.  A least we would have a clear middles of the month and year.  Now seven day working weeks, that's just bizarre, right? 

[WealthyRadish]

Since it's been a year or so, I want to be on record again as stating that metric is bad and dumb and 12 is the best small base (but 60 is better).

I think base 60 would be interesting, but it ends up being pretty verbose (understanding that it would surely be some mixed-decimal system rather than introducing 50 new symbols).

If we copied the mesopotamians (but with modern things like zeros) it could be something like '9 -> 09', '10 -> 10', '59 -> 59', '60 -> 01|00', '121 -> 02|01', etc. I think a separator symbol is essential; writing a number like 4294967295 as '053124062815' or '05C1B406B8A5' would make it very difficult to read and correctly pair the digits, while '05|31|24|06|28|15' is as easy as reading 02:15 for time.

Still, even without the separators, only being able to fit 60 digits where 100 were possible in decimal with the same number of symbols isn't great for space. Including the separators, as I think would be necessary on most displays, it's really awful in this respect, whereas base 12 or even 6 get the important fractions that decimal sucks at without requiring symbol pairing.

[Maximum Spin]

I think base 60 would be interesting, but it ends up being pretty verbose (understanding that it would surely be some mixed-decimal system rather than introducing 50 new symbols).

We don't need NEW symbols, we already have enough symbols for BASE64, which is base 64. 60 is less!

[Reelya]

Since it's been a year or so, I want to be on record again as stating that metric is bad and dumb and 12 is the best small base (but 60 is better).

I think base 60 would be interesting, but it ends up being pretty verbose (understanding that it would surely be some mixed-decimal system rather than introducing 50 new symbols).

Base 60 is interesting but I don't think the whole number system should be designed around it. Grouping by 60s works well in either base 10 or 12.

Consider this, if distances were grouped in base 60 then you could have 3600 feet to a 'mile', then if you specified velocity in feet per second, it would be the same number as miles per hour, a neato touch.

[WealthyRadish]

Since it's been a year or so, I want to be on record again as stating that metric is bad and dumb and 12 is the best small base (but 60 is better).

I think base 60 would be interesting, but it ends up being pretty verbose (understanding that it would surely be some mixed-decimal system rather than introducing 50 new symbols).

Base 60 is interesting but I don't think the whole number system should be designed around it. Grouping by 60s works well in either base 10 or 12.

Consider this, if distances were grouped in base 60 then you could have 3600 feet to a 'mile', then if you specified velocity in feet per second, it would be the same number as miles per hour, a neato touch.

Right, but you would still also end up with other competing natural measures like 1000 B12 feet in a metric "kilofoot" (1728 decimal feet) for simplified digital fractions and compatibility with base 12 scientific notation, while that 3600 decimal foot mile would have the still kind of awkward number of 2,100 feet in base 12. It'd still be annoying to deal with converting fractional miles to other units, like when converting from miles to feet which would require a multiply or divide by 2,100 instead of just moving the radix point as you would do with "kilofeet" in "base 12 metric". It's only useful since time uses a different base that also requires awkward conversions; I think base 12 would be good enough that you could use it for time as well, personally.

[Reelya]

Yeah I thought of that before, the main issue with these hypothetical measuring systems is working around the issue of time, since a day is a set period, so it's more about seeing how different ideas work with that.

In base 12 one thing you could do is 72 minutes to the hour, 72 seconds to the minute, keep number of hours per day the same. This would work similarly as if you had things in a base-10 system grouped in 50s.

[scriver]

It's not an ideal base number system unless you can count it with your fingers

[McTraveller]

Now, now: the year is 5 months of 73 days each, of course.

Also, if you can't count to 31 on one (5-fingered) hand, you're doing it wrong 

[voliol]

60 is divisible by 12, the current system would work as well for a base-12 system as it does for a base-10, in fact even a little better as 24 is also a multiple of 12, and not of 10.

...After further thoughts I get why 72 is elegant, it is 12*6, the factors of 6 (2 and 3) also being factors of 12. 60=12*5 doesn't do that for you.

[Reelya]

Yeah, in base 12, 72 would be the equivalent of 50 in base 10.

[Maximum Spin]

...After further thoughts I get why 72 is elegant, it is 12*6, the factors of 6 (2 and 3) also being factors of 12. 60=12*5 doesn't do that for you.

That's actually the opposite of what makes a good base. A good base has a lot of factors so it neatly divides into many different sizes of piles. 60 divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Unfortunately you can't get 7 without going way too high, but nobody ever really wants seven of anything anyway. 120 or 180 are also nice, netting you 8 or 9 respectively, but still beyond my idea of a base too annoyingly large to use.

Also, if you can't count to 31 on one (5-fingered) hand, you're doing it wrong 

I use them as ternary digits: extended, bent at the first (second? which way do you number these from?) knuckle, and lowered. It's of course possible to pack in even more information per finger if you can be bothered, but ternary is at a nice nexus of useful and easy, especially if you also know balanced ternary.

[McTraveller]

31 on one hand was for the computerphiles.  So long as you don't get offended by certain single- or two- finger configurations*.

Spoiler: *fascinating aside (click to show/hide)

Which is wholly culturally defined and has to be learned. Children will count and/or point at things using "offensive" finger gestures all the time, and it's only because someone says "oh that's offensive!" does it become so.