A very stupid question, but… if we have ten fingers, shouldn’t we be counting in base 11? One can express 0–9 *and* 10 with their fingers.
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counting to 32 in binary on your hands is pretty easy too
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Answer: “What we see historically is counting on one's fingers – by fives or by tens – not counting in base 10.”https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/461249/why-dont-we-use-base-6-or-11 …
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Or, just a version of the usual generalized answer, “people are not machines, Marcin.”
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With 10 fingers we can count to 1023 using base 2. Each finger is a bit. Finger up = 1, finger down = 0.
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Yeah, but… that’s no fun. :·)
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Wouldn’t Morse code be considered a ternary (base-3) system because of the necessary gaps between character sequences of dots and dashes?
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Definitely, hence “roughly.” I heard sometimes even quaternary, since interword and intersentence gaps can be different.
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