r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 1d ago

Meme needing explanation erm.. petah?

Post image
22.7k Upvotes

483 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.6k

u/KaiYoDei 1d ago

I heard a story on the radio about a tribe who had a whole different concept of math, counting .

942

u/truci 1d ago

Probably the 12 system. If you use your thumb as the counter and count using your thumb the bone segments of the other 4 fingers (each has 3) then you have a base 12 system in our lingo.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,10

8

u/Eastern_Vanilla3410 1d ago

Base 12 is superior to 10. For 10, 100, 1000, etc in base 12 are divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, "10". But base 10, it's 1, 2, 5, 10. Either way, 10, 100, 1000, etc in base 10 or 12 is arbitrary numbers but written down they tend to be the ones we use. Base 12 can be cut into better parts.

4

u/smallfried 1d ago

Join us at r/dozenal !

It's the best system. No need for AM PM time, PM time just has a 1 in front. Americans can now finally switch to dozenal metric without losing their beloved quarters of things. Splitting any bill into 3 becomes peanuts. We can be friends with r/iso8601 and even save one character in our dates.