| ▲ | willis936 6 days ago |
| Plato argued that 7! was the ideal number of citizens in a city because it was a highly factorable number. Being able to cut numbers up is an time-tested favorite. That's why there are 360 degrees. |
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| ▲ | nyeah 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| Plato is being annoying, and not for the first time. Sure, 7! has a lot of factors. But one person dies and you've got 5039. That's prime[1], so I guess your society breaks down?
[1] https://prime-numbers.fandom.com/wiki/5,039#:~:text=5%2C039%... |
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| ▲ | almost 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year. Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour. |
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| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | amelius 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | But why wasn't the handcounting inherited too? It sounds useful to be able to count up until 60 on two hands. | | |
| ▲ | balamatom 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Probably because it was too contrived. I mean, if you can count up to 12 on one, why can't you do up to 144 on both? | | |
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| ▲ | rich_sasha 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > That's why there are 360 degrees. Not that these are exclusive, but I thought it's a rounding of 365.25 days a year stemming from Egypt. 360 is a pretty useful number of degrees for a starry sky that changes ince a night. |
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| ▲ | jalk 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I believe the 360 degrees is attributed to Babylonians, who were using the Sumerian base 60 number system (6*60=360) | | |
| ▲ | AndrewOMartin 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I just can't resist, pointing out that a "minute" is what you get when you split up an hour into 60 minute (i.e. the word pronounced my-newt) pieces, and a "second" is what you get if you break a minute into 60 pieces (i.e. you've performed the division a "second" time). By this logic, 0.016 (recurring) seconds should be a called a "third". | | | |
| ▲ | handsclean 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To elaborate a little, an advantage of this is there are many numbers it’s evenly divisible by. 60: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 100: 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50 360: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180 | | | |
| ▲ | nyeah 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's attributed, but the Babylonians knew a year was about 360 days. |
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| ▲ | vbezhenar 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I've always held opinion that ideal base for our day life computation is 12. It's close enough to 10, so most things would work just as well (like you just need to remember 2 more digits), but it's actually divisible by 3, 4, 6 which is a lot more useful than 5, compared to 10-base. |
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| ▲ | jodrellblank 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > "(like you just need to remember 2 more digits)" "The standard among mathematicians for writing larger bases is to extend the Arabic numerals using the Latin alphabet, so ten is written with the letter A and eleven is written with the letter B. But actually doing it that way makes ten and eleven look like they're too separate from the rest of the digits so you can use an inverted two for ten and an inverted three for eleven. But those don't display in most fonts so you can approximate them with the letters T and E which also happen to be the first letters of the English words ten and eleven. But actually as long as we're okay for using the Latin alphabet characters for these digits then we might as well use X for ten like in Roman numerals. But actually now we're back to having them look too different from the other ten digits so how about instead we use the Greek letters Chi and Epsilon but actually if we're using Greek letters then there's no association between the X looking letter and the number ten, so maybe you can write ten with the Greek letter delta instead. And all you really need to learn is those 'two new digits' and you're ready to use dozenal." - Jan Misali in his comedy video on why base 6 is a better way to count than base 12 or base 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qID2B4MK7Y0 (which is a pisstake and ends up making the point that Base 10 isn't so bad). ("in dozenal, a seventh is written as 0.186X35 recurring because it's equal to one gross eight dozen ten great gross ten gross three dozen five eleven gross eleven dozen eleven great gross eleven dozen eleventh's"). | | |
| ▲ | DonHopkins 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >...one gross eight dozen ten great gross ten gross three dozen five eleven gross eleven dozen eleven great gross eleven dozen eleventh's Now do PI! Then Tom Lehrer's New Math. | |
| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | metaltyphoon 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ideally you learn with what you are both with. It’s easy to have base 10 as you have ten fingers. If we only had 8 fingers we could have ended up with octal | | |
| ▲ | vbezhenar 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Civilisations of the past used various numeric systems, including 5, 8 and 12. It's not like 10 was universal truth across all the lands. | |
| ▲ | DonHopkins 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You must be an AI, since I only have 8 fingers and two thumbs. ;) |
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| ▲ | e-topy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, metric is cool and all, you can divide by ten and multiply by ten. But even better would be a hexadecimal system so that you could halve, third and quarter it. Plus it's n^2 so it's a perfect square \s |
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| ▲ | gxs 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Or 60 minutes in an hour 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60 |
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| ▲ | BobbyTables2 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wonder why we don’t have 720 degrees… (6!) |
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| ▲ | top_coder 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe because 360 is already divisible by 6, so 720 is not much of an upgrade over 5!. 7! On the other hand adds another prime factor to it. | | |
| ▲ | mjevans 6 days ago | parent [-] | | 7! 5040 has the less than useful property of being quite large for interacting with human scales. 5! 120 however lacks fine precision required at human scale. Haven't done the math but it's probably something like using 3.1 as the analog of Pi. 360 seems like it might have been chosen based on a mix of precision and practicality. Many small prime factors ( 2 2 2 3 3 5 ). Also an extra prior prime factor for every added prime. 75600 too big, and 12 what analog clock faces use as their primary number. |
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| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | 360 is base 60. (6*60) Like minutes and seconds. The 12 hours in a day and the 12 months are also 60 / 5. This all connects to ancient Mesopotamia somehow. | | |
| ▲ | bregma 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > 12 hours in a day I guess, for a sufficiently large value of 12. | | |
| ▲ | otabdeveloper4 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes, the original day was 12 hours. (Hence the legacy of "AM" and "PM" that some countries still use.) |
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| ▲ | ljm 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| And many of the conversions between metric and imperial align with the Fibonacci sequence on any order of magnitude. 130km/h is roughly 80mph simply because the fibo sequence has 8 and 13. Obviously not an emergent property but shows how these things were designed. |
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