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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.)