this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
161 points (94.5% liked)
Dad Jokes
15424 readers
222 users here now
Description
This is a community for sharing those cheesy “dad” jokes that invoke an eye roll or chuckle.
Rules
- Clean jokes only please. If you cannot tell this joke to a 5-year-old, you probably shouldn’t post it here. Please post edgier jokes to [email protected]
- Must post text, image (e.g., meme), or direct link. Do not post external links that cannot be viewed directly from the community (e.g., link to joke website, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- Follow Lemmy.World Code of Conduct
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are a great number of ways you can count on fingers. You can easily support base 4, base 5, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 19, and even higher (144, say) with finger counting. There's nothing particularly "natural" about 10.
This is not even slightly true.
Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.
There is literally nothing "natural" about base 10. Indeed it's not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.