Metric essay

[Greg Hermann]

>
>The real tragedy is that we came so close to evolving with six
>fingers on each hand.  We could have had a twelve based
>system.  The base divides rationally by 1,2,3,4 and 6.  The
>european peasants and central american indians had it right
>when they observed that eggs and apples fit nicely in boxes in
>dozens and a dozen dozen is a nice large number.  Gross,
>acres, years, hours, minutes  and miles all divide nicely by 12.
>We have a de facto 12 based system in some aspects of
>commerce.
>
>My personal vote is for a 16 based system to achieve an
>improvement in precision and computation speed.  No more
>decimal adjusts and floating point precision would be more
>easily maintained.  I wonder how long it would take us to reach a
>consensus on the names and shapes of the six new digits.
>Well, I guess we already have ten, eleven and twelve named,
>we only need three  more.
>
Right on!!

A twelve based counting system would be VASTLY superior to 10 based, then
base a new system of units on the inch and foot, and base the entire system
on exponents of twelve. All we would need would be two new number
characters!

Sixteen would be nice for computers, but maybe some other really good use
for the other four bits could be standardized (such as : +, -, & a two
digit (base twelve) exponent???)---it's not as though computers are
capacity challenged anymore!

EFI content--Twelve cylinder engines are very nice indeed, and have perfect
primary AND secondary balance, as well as being rather easy to build proper
headers & intakes for! They can also be plumbed for two, three, four, or
six turbos!!

Greg