Canadian engineer here. Although we use the metric system in principle, in reality we use feet and inches for everything. There are lots of benefits to using base 12 for measurements.
The number 12 has six factors, which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. It is the smallest number to have six factors, the largest number to have at least half of the numbers below it as divisors, and is only slightly larger than 10. (The numbers 18 and 20 also have six factors but are much larger.) Ten, in contrast, only has four factors, which are 1, 2, 5, and 10.
I get the Europeans hate it though because only the people who live near Chernobyl can count to 12 on their fingers.
If you look at your hand when it is wide open and palm up you can use the tip of your thumb to touch any of the 12 (four fingers each with three) sections of your fingers. Counting in 12 might be very intuitive for early humans - or might not. Who knows.
The thing is that outside of North America people aren’t terrified to death of decimals. We actually use them and find the process simple. So those factors of yours are completely irrelevant to us.
The thing is, we just use whole numbers. If you get under 1, then you move down by one SI prefix et voilà, you have whole numbers again
I’ve never thought of counting on fingers as a good reason for using it for units. But since our numeric system is base 10 (likely because of having 10 fingers indeed), it’s easier to have our unit systems as base 10 too. If we all learned to think in base 12 from ground up, having base 12 units would make a lot more sense too
Btw you can count to 12 on your fingers with one hand. Starting from the end of the index finger tap each segment of the “remaining” four fingers with your thumb.
I heard someone claim that’s how Babylonians invented and used the base 12 system in the first place.
Canadian engineer here. Although we use the metric system in principle, in reality we use feet and inches for everything. There are lots of benefits to using base 12 for measurements.
The number 12 has six factors, which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. It is the smallest number to have six factors, the largest number to have at least half of the numbers below it as divisors, and is only slightly larger than 10. (The numbers 18 and 20 also have six factors but are much larger.) Ten, in contrast, only has four factors, which are 1, 2, 5, and 10.
I get the Europeans hate it though because only the people who live near Chernobyl can count to 12 on their fingers.
If you look at your hand when it is wide open and palm up you can use the tip of your thumb to touch any of the 12 (four fingers each with three) sections of your fingers. Counting in 12 might be very intuitive for early humans - or might not. Who knows.
The thing is that outside of North America people aren’t terrified to death of decimals. We actually use them and find the process simple. So those factors of yours are completely irrelevant to us.
The thing is, we just use whole numbers. If you get under 1, then you move down by one SI prefix et voilà, you have whole numbers again
I’ve never thought of counting on fingers as a good reason for using it for units. But since our numeric system is base 10 (likely because of having 10 fingers indeed), it’s easier to have our unit systems as base 10 too. If we all learned to think in base 12 from ground up, having base 12 units would make a lot more sense too
Btw you can count to 12 on your fingers with one hand. Starting from the end of the index finger tap each segment of the “remaining” four fingers with your thumb.
I heard someone claim that’s how Babylonians invented and used the base 12 system in the first place.
I know it’ll never happen but I’m still camp duodecimal, all the way.