Good Links: Alien's Fingers

[StudyOriented]

Hello,

First of all, sorry if my English is bad, that because i am not from an English-speaking country.
But, i think you could understand what i say, because mathematics is universal. :smile:

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"There are 10 rocks" said the alien with four fingers.

"No, There are 4 rocks, you must be counting with base-4, look i count using base-10" said the astronaut.

"No, i use base-10 to count, what is base-4?" ask the alien confused.

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Why does the alien confused?
It is because everyone no matter how many fingers they had, they will say that they counted with "base-10" relative to their own finger. The alien does not know what our 4 is, because our 4 is their 10.


Ever imagined how the life out there in space?
Or maybe, ever curious about how many fingers does an alien have?

Since we were a little we taught to count with our 10 fingers, Base 10 or Decimal.
What if a little alien have 6 fingers instead of 10? How would be the little alien counting?

Even Babylonians use base-60, and i also heard a rumor that clocks use 12 or 24 could be after ancient Egyptians using base 12 and counting with finger joints, but their hieroglyph and relics proof that they are using base 10.

Here are exciting links i found on the net about counting bases
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc a good video from numberphile about base 12
http://octomatics.org/ a very amazing website, promoting base 8 with their creative numbers and many more

there also many base converter in the net, you should check out by yourself!

That's all from me, Thank You ​

 

[Quaid]

Good luck in the USA, octomatarians! I don't see a major switch to base-8 happening here.

We've had metric measurements in place for decades, and most citizens ignore them. (We don't even know whether a kilometer is more than a mile -- or less.)

There's another group advocating for switching the USA to a base-12 number system. Good luck with that, too, although base-12 does lend itself to some interesting graphical patterns:

https://www.khanacademy.org/math/applied-math/cryptography/comp-number-theory/p/prime-density-spiral

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82fd_HhQ8aA (friend of my daughter's)

http://www.vincico.com/arqam/CyclicResonances.pdf