• Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
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    9 hours ago

    I gotta say, you make some fair points.

    It’s a lot of memorization that I simply haven’t done and won’t ever have to do.

    The fraction reduction doesn’t help intuitive thought. If imperial operated on ‘significant digits’ and marked any set or document with a 64th always as 64ths, as in 16/64ths, I’d be more on board.

    We just need to replace out base 10 system of counting with base 12 and we’d get the best of both worlds!

    • Octavio@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Yeah, absolutely, I’m not arguing in favor of making everyone do the memorization, I just think it’s interesting that it occurs after enough exposure.

      I’ve often thought that if we’d have evolved to have 6 digits instead of 5, we might have adopted a base 12 system and made fractional calculations a lot easier.