[PenultimateManStanding]

You are completely right. It's having a place system that matters. Binary is perfect for computers but awkward otherwise. Decimal seems to be a natural choice because we have ten fingers. Octal and hexadecimal are convenient for representing binary numbers. However, not to quibble, but numerologists are those folks who ascribe mystic meanings to numbers. Take nine, for instance. There were nine original Knights Templars in the order who went to Jerusalem in The Crusades. There were nine Nazguls in The Lord Of The Rings and John Lennon found it to be a psychedelic number, etc. Oh yeah, and nine is the Mystic Number of the Sudoku puzzles.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', '
')Edit: Yes PMS, that's not quibbling - I directed my original post at the numerologists here, e.g. Golem.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Here is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal in action: I noticed that there were three replies and twenty seven views. 3 to the third power! But by posting this I have disrupted the order of numerological significance, i.e. destroyed that which I observed. BTW, this month I turn 54 and I was born in '54.

[Dreamtwister]

Why does everyone here always post in English?

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'H')ow do you justify giving such significance to the decimal system? When you do sums here it's always in decimal. What's wrong with octal, binary, or better yet duodecimal? Or if other systems are used how do you decide which one to use?

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'H')ow do you justify giving such significance to the decimal system? When you do sums here it's always in decimal. What's wrong with octal, binary, or better yet duodecimal? Or if other systems are used how do you decide which one to use?

[AWPrime]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'H')ow do you justify giving such significance to the decimal system? When you do sums here it's always in decimal. What's wrong with octal, binary, or better yet duodecimal? Or if other systems are used how do you decide which one to use?

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AWPrime', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'H')ow do you justify giving such significance to the decimal system? When you do sums here it's always in decimal. What's wrong with octal, binary, or better yet duodecimal? Or if other systems are used how do you decide which one to use?

[Tanada]

Historically the Sumerians used base 60, which was rather cumbersome but which is the reason we have 60 second and 60 minutes and 360 degrees, all easy math in Base 60. The Maya or the Inca (I forget which) used base 20 because they habitually went barefoot and counted on both fingers and toes (or so I was taught). Europeans were counting in Duodecimal for many years and we still have the remnants of those structure in place today with 12 hours on the clock, a special word for Dozen (10 base 12), Gross (100 base twelve) and Great Gross (1000 base 12). It is also the reason Eleven and Twelve have their own names instead of being known as Aceteen and Dueceteen. Those roots run very deep into prehistory (before written records) in languages of northern Europe.

Egyptians used Decimal, which was adopted by the Greeks, then by the Romans and foisted off on the rest of us. I use Decimal because most people who can do any math at all use it and understand it but I would prefer Octal or Duodecimal if I could get everyone to change.

(Biblically 7 and 12 form complete sets [seven days, twelve apostles, seven feasts, twelve months] which would be easy to make Octol and Duodecimal so if the RCC had adopted either in say 400 AD they are what we would be using today as European culture is where numbers, calander and so on of daily life all come from. A centigrade thermometer based on Duodecimal would read closer to a Farenheit thermometer and would be more percise because the degrees would be smaller. Same goes for a Meter and all the things based on it, the first calculated meter was something like on millionth of the distance from the equator to the pole. More numbers makes the meter shorter and more precise a measuring unit.)

[jdumars]

I think the whole base number system is jive, just like most human "objective" systems.

I think a much better numeric model is probability-based and on a scale between zero and one. Essentially zero being no chance that something is true/will happen/can happen, and one being absolute certainty that something happened/will happen. Using this system, things like pi are not a mystery at all. For example, pi is an esoteric representation of an infinitely-sided polygon, or in my system of representation .9999..... it reaches 1 when it ceases being a polygon and becomes a circle. It's the same with quantum state shifting -- becoming/became.

To hell with fixed systems.

[emailking]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', ' ')Is there some reason decimal is fundamentally more important to numerologists than other systems, or is it arbitrary?

[emailking]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jdumars', 'I') think the whole base number system is jive, just like most human "objective" systems.

I think a much better numeric model is probability-based and on a scale between zero and one. Essentially zero being no chance that something is true/will happen/can happen, and one being absolute certainty that something happened/will happen. Using this system, things like pi are not a mystery at all. For example, pi is an esoteric representation of an infinitely-sided polygon, or in my system of representation .9999..... it reaches 1 when it ceases being a polygon and becomes a circle. It's the same with quantum state shifting -- becoming/became.

To hell with fixed systems.

[AWPrime]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrBean', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AWPrime', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'H')ow do you justify giving such significance to the decimal system? When you do sums here it's always in decimal. What's wrong with octal, binary, or better yet duodecimal? Or if other systems are used how do you decide which one to use?

[jdumars]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('emailking', '
')I think I sort of see what you're getting at, but this is just shifting the pile under the rug. For one 0.9999... is equal to 1. That's just true. Also, setting pi = 1 doesn't change it's weirdness. It still can't be written as a ratio of integers and is thus irrational (transcendental even). I don't know how quantum mechanics is supposed to come into this, but any attempt to make sense of that bizarreness is going to have to come from a new understanding of the physical world or a shift in what "makes sense" to us.

[PenultimateManStanding]

yeah, so what if you want a dozen proximal probabilistically similar eggs?

[Dreamtwister]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jdumars', 'I') think you missed my point altogether. My frame of reference is not an arbitrary system, but a representation of the physical world. Math and numerology make some very bold assumptions, like there can be 2 objects/quantities, etc. that are exactly identical. That's what a quantity is. 2 apples, 2 electrons, etc. While this is convenient for approximation purposes, it is not factual at all. There are no 2 identical anythings, because every assemblage of matter is wholly unique.

[MrBean]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AWPrime', '
')Consistent numerology is quite an oxymoron. But if you can present a consistent version of numerology, then please try it. The results should be quite interesting.

[emailking]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jdumars', '
') Math and numerology make some very bold assumptions, like there can be 2 objects/quantities, etc. that are exactly identical. That's what a quantity is. 2 apples, 2 electrons, etc. While this is convenient for approximation purposes, it is not factual at all.