08-27-2017, 05:43 PM | #1711 | |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
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Prime factors of 60 are 1, 2, 3, 5 Prime factorization is 2×2×3×5. Next logical choice base is 2×3×5×7... 210. But even at 20, we see the practical system isn't base 20 in practice. (Meso and South-American empires used base 20 in a base 5 and base 4 combination. 0-4 dots, then bars for each 5, with a zero indicator, and place locations being powers of 20. Likewise, Babylonian, has (essentially) tallies for 1-9, and then arrows for 10-50, and a placeholder for "nothing in this placevalue" with placevalues being powers of 60. |
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08-27-2017, 09:40 PM | #1712 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Upper Peninsula of Michigan
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
To keep this on gaming, note that hexadactyly is a dominant trait, so it's only by a quirk of evolution that the general body plan on our branch of the tree of life has five digits. Six would have been a very easy change, and perhaps even somewhat more likely than five; instead of having the PCs' home universe in a multiworld game be different in some way that provides them an advantage, perhaps it's simply odd that we're quintadactyl.
Everyone else might be comfortable with base-6 or base-12, which have considerable advantages over base-10, in that they are more divisible in useful ways. Should we be interacting with humans from worlds where the general norm is hexadactyly, we might be at a disadvantage when using their equipment, lacking the extra finger; on the occasional plus side, it's much easier to disguise one of us as one of them than vice versa. |
08-28-2017, 01:13 AM | #1713 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
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HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here. |
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08-28-2017, 01:15 AM | #1714 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
Quote:
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HMS Overflow-For conversations off topic here. |
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08-28-2017, 06:20 AM | #1715 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
It's probably hard to imagine from a modern viewpoint, but the Babylonians couldn't do fractions. Even the Egyptians had a pretty awkward and limited system for doing arithmetic with parts of things. When you can't do fractions at all, it becomes much more useful and important to have a system with more possible integer divisors, so as to be able to calculate more results and maintain more accuracy while using only integers.
(This is one reason for the existence of some of the old units with high counts -- 7000 grains in a pound, 1024 drams per gallon. When you can't deal with the quantity 3 / 7000 * price_per_pound, you can at least adopt a tiny unit so you can just deal with the integer quantity 3 * price_per_grain. Annoying as counting out all those grains might be, it still beats not being able to calculate.) Quote:
Last edited by Anaraxes; 08-28-2017 at 07:02 AM. |
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08-28-2017, 06:37 AM | #1716 | |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
Oh, the armor is even better than an iron sulfide coating. It's actually a multi-layered structure, with the iron sulfide particles sitting on top of a flexible organic, proteinaceous layer, which in turn sits on a calcified inner shell, for alternating layers of rigidity and flex. It's layered composite armor, like the armor on modern main battle tanks.
More than you wanted to know can be found in this PNAS article, which has wonderful paragraphs that would fit right into some forum conversations, like: Quote:
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08-28-2017, 08:32 AM | #1717 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
I was talking about the supposed revelation that base-60 presents to modern mathematicians.
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08-28-2017, 12:33 PM | #1718 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
Quote:
Those shortcuts may or may not be reverse engineered into other bases; I don't know. Quote:
One of the mesoamerican versions uses 3 distinct glyphs: Dots, bars, and eyes. 0: eye 1-4: that many dots 5: 1 bar 6-9: 1 bar under 1-4 dots 10: 2 bars 11-14: 2 bars under 1-4 dots 15: 3 bars 16-19: 3 bars under 1-4 dots 20: cell 1: 1 dot; Cell 2: eye. 103: cell 1: 1 bar; Cell 2: 3 dots 417: cell 1: 1 dot; cell 2: eye; cell 3: 3 bars under 2 dots Assyrians use two half-spaces per "digit" Right half: 1-9 are a cluster of vertical tallies in a 3x3 grid left half: 10,20,30,40,50: 1 to five left-pointing "carets" < Empty Place value: two diagonal marks \\ |
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08-28-2017, 12:43 PM | #1719 | |
Untagged
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
Quote:
Black smokers spew out lots of unique chemicals with elements in forms far more readily bio-available than they are anywhere else. Finding/creating value in the valueless but common is a wonderful aspect of evolution.
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08-28-2017, 12:52 PM | #1720 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Meifumado
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Re: Real-Life Weirdness
Okay, but are any of these things revelations that modern mathematicians didn't know about until this paper revealed "the lost secrets of Babylonian trig?" Do they gain anything by using base-60 that isn't gained by using radians or purely algebraic expressions, and that wasn't already known about?
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blueberry muffin, fermi paradox |
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