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Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by Groxx on Tuesday February 08, 2011 @07:24PM (#2195584)
Why stop there? Lets have base 1024, you can count to that on your fingers too!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary

Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by anigbrowl on Tuesday February 08, 2011 @08:12PM (#2195733)
No, you can represent it with your fingers but not count it. By 'count' I mean an ordinal traversal of the sort you teach kids.
Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by eru on Tuesday February 08, 2011 @09:07PM (#2195929)
Use gray code.
Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by anigbrowl on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @09:23PM (#2200406)
Good luck teaching that to a 4 year old, or someone who's barely numerate. Higher bases are better for learning counting because the person can count a variety of small quantities without needing to understand the concept of a number base. It's not that I don't approve of binary counting by hand, but it's hardly useful for beginners or primitive societies.
Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by eru on Thursday February 10, 2011 @07:26AM (#2201690)
Oh, for that application, my suggestion of gray code is even worse then binary.

Though actually, you are not really arguing for a large base, but for unary. (Or a mixed unary-large base system.)

Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by Natsu on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @03:16AM (#2196812)
Because it makes it so that the number four has another meaning that, for whatever reason, people can't get past.

I've tried to explain it to people before, but we never manage to count past four without someone laughing.

Re:Update your timezone defs: Russia abolishes winter time (... by Groxx on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @11:41AM (#2198048)
Then they're missing a far better number: 132