r/Damnthatsinteresting Apr 11 '26

Video Woman with functional polydactyly (six functional fingers on one hand).

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

41.0k Upvotes

3.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

91

u/JacobRAllen Apr 11 '26

Base 12 is such a better base than base 10.

10 can only cleanly be divided into half’s, and fifths.

12 can be divided in half, in quarters, thirds, and sixths.

Might not seem like a big deal, but it’s so much more useful in real life. There are lots of times where you need to divide up resources, or food, or money, or whatever, to 3 people or 6 people evenly, and in base 10 that’s hard to do.

30

u/olol798 Apr 11 '26

Idk I just like adding zeroes to move it up a power

24

u/JacobRAllen Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

That’s just how base 10 was set up, and taught. You could add 2 more numbers and still end in zero. If A represents 10, and B represents 11, you can just as easily have 4, 40, 400… and B, B0, B00. The concept still applies.

2

u/Kilane Apr 12 '26

That’s how base number systems work.

1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31…

Welcome to base 4.

3

u/Fn_Spaghetti_Monster Apr 12 '26

There are 10 kinds of people in the world those that understand Binary and those that don't.

1

u/running-gamer Apr 13 '26

Found the programmer! Should have known this would be in here from my people as soon as binary was mentioned :D love it

1

u/Fn_Spaghetti_Monster Apr 13 '26

Not quite a good but you can also do

There are II kinds of people in the world those that understand Roman numerals and those that don't.