12 Followers! · 12:48am Jul 14th, 2016
This is sick!
12 really is such a beautiful number.
Okay, so, right. How do I begin?
The imperial system (the system that the USA and old British people use) has a thing called a foot. I would assume most people know this. I would also assume that most people know that a foot can be divided into 12 inches. And that's great!
The metric system, on the other hand, is very simple and works well with our base 10 number system. The metric prefixes are easy to remember, (nano, micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga, etc) and increase/decrease by powers of 10.
Yep! That's pretty common knowledge. The next thing I'm about to say is also common knowledge but it may not be something you have considered.
So let's talk about 12 and why the imperial system rocks (sort of).
12 has 6 factors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12. Notice something really really cool: it has factors of 2, 3, and 4! That means 12 can be divided evenly into 4 parts, 3 parts, and 2 parts! So that means that the imperial system uses a unit of measurement that can be easily divided into thirds, and halves. This makes carpentry so very easy, when you consider it.
10, on the other hand, has 4 factors, but its only 2 places away from 12. 12 is relatively small and has a lot of factors. Half of the numbers between 12 and 1 are factors! Think about how awesome that is!
Okay, sorry, enough about 12. 10: it's not a great number. It seems to natural to use 10 because we've used it our whole lives. But imagine if 12 was just written as "10." So consider what 10 is. 10 is what happens when you reach 9 and have to continue, so you just restart at 1 and add a placeholder 0. What if we did this with a base 12 system? Well think about hexadecimal! All we do with hex is add some more characters to count with. So doing this with 12 would just be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, 10! "10" in this case represents 12. If we used a base 12 numeral system, then repeating decimals would be less common. 0.3333 repeating would not occur, and only wierd, larger primes like 7, 11, and 13 would pose problems.
So, in conclusion, a base 12 number system is neat and 12 is a great and useful number. The imperial system takes advantage of this and is cool because of that. Note, though, that I'm not endorsing the imperial system. The metric system remains more simple, more definite, and much less convoluted. There are no "yards" and "miles" just meters and multiples of meters.
So yeah. I just wanted to show my appreciation to the 4 people that follow and read this post. Seriously, thanks. I've been away for a while and I just wanted to say thanks.
