This episode brought to you by the number 10

So... roughly speaking the Metric System is based on water, an inaccurate measurement of the Earth's size, and the fact that we have 10 fingers. It is a great system because it is logical, consistent, and convenient. Water is a convenient material to use since it's so abundant. The Earth's circumference is I think way too ambiguous to measure down to the fractions of a meter, but the meter has been recalibrated to something more precise using lasers or something. And all measures are related by powers of 10, which is very practical since our counting system is based on 10. Sadly, this whole 10 business may be the system's only possible shortcoming and I will explain presently. We like 10 because we're so used to it and we can count to 10 on our hands. And because of that we've become very happy to count things using 10's, like decades and such. But in most other scenarios, I think 10 is an inconvenient number dispite how pretty it looks. Try dividing a pizza into 10 nearly equal slices quickly and easily. We'd cut it in half, then each half into 5 which doesn't come naturally. Much easier to cut it into 2 then 4 then 8 equal pieces because we just keep cutting things in half. Powers of 2 are nice when portioning things.

So what if we were like cartoon characters and had 8 fingers like Mickey Mouse. Actually we do have 8 fingers (plus 2 thumbs) but that's arguable. Then we'd be counting in Octal instead of Decimal. We'd count 0 through 7, days would have 030 hours, we'd count special anniversaries in Octaves instead of Decades, and it would all seem very natural to us. In fact, I think we'd hardly ever even think of the number 10 (or 12/Octal). I think a lot of our convenient fascination with 10 is largely artificial; for everything we're used to counting in groups of ten we'd equally be comfortable counting in groups of eight without missing a beat. But the added advantage is that 8 is a power of 2 and I think that would simplify our natural interaction with numbers quite a bit. I think it's much more natural and common to think of, deal with, and portion things in terms of pairs (2) and halves (1/2) than any other numbers. An Octal counting system would handle that very elegantly.

Consider, instead of [32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, ...] in decimal, we'd have [40, 20, 10, 4, 2, 1, 0.4, 0.2, 0.1, 0.04, 0.02, ...] in Octal and we'd have a nice easy pleasant-looking pattern of symbols with which to express doublings and halvings.

I was thinking about this a long time ago when looking at some stock exchange quotes which, then, counted things in half fractions, like 1/2, 1/16, 1/32, etc. and again looking at the sizes of nuts and bolts (in the US) that come in 1/4", 1/8", etc. These things get increasingly messy when trying to convert to decimal, especially the stock quotes because you have to round the cents to 100ths and tiny fractions of a cent get increasingly lost in the conversion. And in the modern age, it certainly would ease a bit the working with computer innards and code and whatnot since it operates in binary (we'd probably specify things in Octal instead of Hex though). The Metric System would be based on powers of 8 which would be just that much more applicable to things we do count and measure.

I don't wish we had 8 fingers like a cartoon character (that would make for less interesting piano music) but I do think we would have been a bit better off if people had chosen not to count the thumbs when developing our counting system.

Har!