• frezik@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      What base 12 gives you is a lot of common divisors: 2, 3, 4, and 6. Base 10 only has 2 and 5. Base 16 only has 2, 4, 8.

      The practical upshot of this is that you can divide things evenly in more ways. Particularly when wanting to divide a board into thirds. Having 12 inches to a foot is actually helpful there, though it falls apart as soon as you get larger.

    • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Base 16 is great when you’re interacting with a computer, but aside from that, not much. Only being divisible by 2 is kind of a pain in the real world.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      This is incorrect, and you don’t understand why base 12 is useful. However for binary operations, hex is great. But not for general counting.

    • Overshoot2648@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Both are easily countable on fingers using your thumb and counting up the segments for base 12 and adding the pads for base sixteen. You can reasonably count to 144(gross) or 256 using both hands to create a two digit dozenal or hexadecimal number.