Base 12 - Numberphile

This video scores 9/10. Just 3 points short of a perfect score.

Screw that lets use base 5040 for the ultimate dividing experience

Me: The year 2020 in base 12 is 1204. The people of Constantinople: Aw s**t here we go again.

Fascinating! Great video! As a former Disney animator, we worked at 24 frames per second, which was SO MUCH EASIER to animate things on fractions of a second using 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 24 - as steps in timing for a character or object. I definitely think mathematics would be far simpler using this numbering system, as I still use it to calculate things in my head simply by being exposed to it in my younger years.

11Ɛ8 is 2012, so that means... 11Ɛ9 is 2013, 11ƐX is 2014, 11ƐƐ is 2015, That makes 2016 = 1200. Happy new century, I guess.

time for an infinite base, where each number has its own unique character regardless of how big it is

when I use alternate bases I usually replace the symbols 0-9 as well because I find it hard to get used to numbers that look the same but are different

And for the hand-counting bit at the end, it’s made even easier to count in 12’s if you use your thumb instead of your other hand to count of the segments. This frees another hand to count off groups of twelve, letting you count to 144 on just two hands.

12 guys walk in to a bar the bartender challenge them to drink 100 glass of vines they all agree that it's gross

base 12 is called base 10 in base 12

10 year anniversary. What a wild ride.

Makes more sense. We have: 12 hour day 12 hour night 12 months

There's an alternate universe where this video is about the decimal system.

WhY dOn’T wE cOmPrOmIsE aNd UsE bAsE 11???

There are a number of other things that are also interesting to consider here. For example, it's relatively easy to adjust our calendar to base 12. The easiest options do require SOME changes to what we're used to, but if you have 12 months of 2.5 times 12 days (which could become one week), you're left with 5 days at the end of a year, which you could for example turn into a short holiday, and suddenly the calendar fits with the number system we use. Or timekeeping. There are 86400 seconds in a day. It's kind of a random number, but it's pretty close to 82944, which is 4 times 12^4. And once you know that, it's possible to make an interesting adjustment to our timekeeping: The amount of hours in a day remains the same, 24 (though this is 20 in base 12). The duration of a second can remain ALMOST the same; you increase it by 1/24 (a little more than 4%), and you have 82944 seconds in a day (40000 in base 12), and 3456 seconds in an hour. 3456 somewhat random? No of course not, it's 2000 in base 12. So, what's next? Well, the one change you should probably make is the length of a minute. See, 2000 (in base 12) is 40 (in base 12) times 60 (in base 12), or 48 and 72 in base 10. So an hour has 40 (48 in base 10) minutes, and a minute has 60 (72 in base 10) seconds. Length of an hour remains the same, length of a second remains almost the same, and you have 20 hours in a day, 40 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Nice, round, and only limited adjustment needed from what we're used to, because if you needed 5 seconds for a task, you still need 5 seconds, and if you eat at 6 pm in the evening that's still 6 pm, except now you don't have to adjust with that digital clock that calls it 18:00, because it now says 16:00. The metric system? Can simply adapt along. It's still the biggest change, because a kilo suddenly means 1728 (1000 in base 12) times as many, and so on, but the core of the system remains. The numbers of specific variables (e.g. gas constant, gravity constant, etc) will change, but they will still be one specific number. And then there's prime numbers. In base 10, a prime number can be any number that ends on 1, 3, 7, 9. In base 12, a prime number can be any number that ends on 1, 5, 7, 11 (which becomes the thingy that I don't have on my keyboard). So also four, but there's more numbers. This is because you're automatically excluding any numbers that are divisible by three. It also makes it super easy to see that, for example, all primes are either one more or one less than a multiple of 6 - I actually didn't realize this myself until I wrote down numbers in base 12 and marked primes.

2:26 dodos are extinct :(

I love how he's practically smiling all the time. Edit : Thx for the 600 likes!

5:32 "In dozenal, It dozen happen."

I actually wouldn't mind relearning counting as an adult for future generations for this, but I suspect of course most people wouldn't haha.

"For serious maths, this system will not make any difference." Me: angry digit-based mathematics noises