Occasionally you might come across someone who believes that it would be better for us to count in a base other than 10. Usually people recommend base-12 ("dozenal"); compsci people sometimes recommend base-2 (binary) or base-16 (hexadecimal). My personal opinion is that all of these have significant downsides, not worth trading out base-10 for, but that there is a substantially better base we should be using: base 6.
Let's explore why.
(Warning, this post is long and definitely not edited well enough. Strap in.)
Bases Are Arbitrary
First of all, there's nothing special about base-10. Powers of 10 look nice and round to us because we use base-10, but we can use any other base and get just as round numbers. Base 6 has 106, 1006, 10006 etc. (Those are 6, 3610, 21610, etc; on the other hand, 1010 and 10010 are 146 and 2446. Converting between bases will usually produce awkward numbers no matter which base you start with.)
Why do we use base-10, then? The obvious answer is that we have 10 fingers. Counting off each finger gives us one "unit" of 10 things, and that unit-size carried over until we invented positional notation, where it froze into the base-10 we know today.
If we invented positional notation earlier, tho, then our hands could have supplied a better base - each hand can count off the values 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which are exactly the digits of base-6. Two hands, then, lets you track two base-6 digits, counting up to 556, which is 3510!
Bases Are Significant
On the other hand, there are important qualities that do differ between bases.
The most obvious is the tradeoff of length vs mathematical complexity. Binary has trivial math - the addition and multiplication tables have only four entries each! - but it produces very long numbers - 10010 is 11001002, 7 digits long! On the other hand, using something like, say, base-60 would produce pretty short numbers - 1,000,00010 is only four digits long in base-60 ([4, 37, 46, 40]), but its multiplication table has 3600 entries in it.
When evaluating the tradeoffs of long representations vs complex mental math, it's important to understand a little bit about how the brain actually works for math. In particular, we have a certain level of inherent ability in various domains - short-term memory, computation, etc. Overshooting that ability level is bad - it makes us slower to do mental math, and might require us to drop down to tool usage instead (writing the problem out on paper). But undershooting it is just as bad - our brain can't arbitrarily reallocate "processor cycles" like a computer can, so when we undershoot we're just wasting some of our brain's ability (and, due to the tradeoffs, forcing something else to get harder).
So, we know from experience that binary is bad on these tradeoffs - base-2 arithmetic is drastically undershooting our arithmetic abilities, while binary length quickly exceeds our short-term memory. Similarly, we know that base-60 (used by the Babylonians, way back when) is bad - it drastically overshoots our arithmetic abilities while not significantly reducing the length of numbers, at least in the domain of values we care about (in other words, less than a thousand or so). So there's a happy medium somewhere in the middle here, and conveniently the geometric mean of 2 and 60 is base-11. Give it a healthy ±5 range, and we'll estimate that the "ideal" base is probably somewhere between base-6 and base-16.
Memorization Complexity
But arithmetic complexity, the ease or difficulty of doing math, is more subtle than just a simple length comparison. Some numbers are very easy to do math with in a given base; others are hard. For example, in base 10, it's easy to do math involving 2 or 5, but very difficult with 7.
Exactly which numbers are easy or hard to do math with, and what % of values are easy or hard in a given base, depends on some fundamental arithmetic qualities of the base. Some bases are way worse!
First, addition is more or less equally easy in all bases. Each "row" of an addition table is identical - it's just successive numbers, starting from some offset. Larger bases require us to memorize a few more patterns to do addition quickly, but it's not a significant factor between bases.
Multiplication is where bases really show off. Each row in your times table is totally different, with its own patterns and complexity: some repeat quickly, like the 2s row in base-10 quickly going 2-4-6-8-10 and then repeating with 12-14-16-18-20; others are complex the whole way, like 7.
While some rows are easier to memorize than other (and we'll get to that effect in the next section), overall you have to memorize each row separately, which means the size of the multiplication table matters. Unfortunately for larger bases, this scales up quadratically.
In a given multiplication table, the 0 and 1 rows are trivial and not actually worth counting as "memorized". Similarly, because multiplication is commutative (3×5 and 5×3 are the same), we only actually have to memorize ~half of the values (the diagonal still needs to be fully memorized, tho).
Given these facts, base 10 requires you to memorize 36 individual values. Base 12 requires 56, about 50% more; base 16 requires 105 values, triple that of base 10! On the other hand, base 8 needs only 22, about 2/3s of base 10, and base 6 needs a mere 10 values to be memorized. Base 6 numbers are on average about a digit longer than base 10, but it compensates by making mental math very easy to do!
Arithmetic Complexity
Now let's get down to the specifics - some rows in the multiplication table are harder than others, and which ones are hard or easy varies based on the numeric properties of the base.
There are several ways to talk about this difficulty, but they all end up drawing roughly identical conclusions, so I'll just talk about the simplest: an easy test for how hard a particular number is to do math with in a particular base is to look at how long its unit fraction is when written in that base.
For example, in base-10, 2 is very simple to work with, and its unit fraction, 1/2, is written as 0.5, which is as short and simple as you can get. The same applies to 5: 1/5 is .2, super easy. And harder numbers have harder decimals: 1/7 is .142857 (with underline indicating repeated digits) - six digits with repetition, phew!
Here's the full base 10 set, for the values 2-12:
| Fraction | Base 10 |
|---|---|
| 1/2 | 0.5 |
| 1/3 | 0.3 |
| 1/4 | 0.25 |
| 1/5 | 0.2 |
| 1/6 | 0.16 |
| 1/7 | 0.142847 |
| 1/8 | 0.125 |
| 1/9 | 0.1 |
| 1/10 | 0.1 |
| 1/11 | 0.09 |
| 1/12 | 0.083 |
What we see here should accord pretty well with your intuition: 2, 5, and 10 are pretty trivial, with their single-digit decimal form; 4 is a little harder, with 2 digits; 3 and 9 are single-digit but repeating, so probably roughly equal in difficulty to 4; 6 and 8 are both a good bit harder than anything so far; and 7 is just garbage. Numbers higher than 10 are all at least moderately difficult.
Now that we're familiar with the table, here's the same results for several more bases:
| Fraction | Base 6 | Base 8 | Base 10 | Base 12 | Base 16 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1/2 | .3 | .4 | .5 | .6 | .8 |
| 1/3 | .2 | .25 | .3 | .4 | .5 |
| 1/4 | .13 | .2 | .25 | .3 | .4 |
| 1/5 | .1 | .1463 | .2 | .2497 | .3 |
| 1/6 | .1 | .125 | .16 | .2 | .2a |
| 1/7 | .05 | .1 | .142857 | .186a35 | .249 |
| 1/8 | .043 | .1 | .125 | .16 | .2 |
| 1/9 | .04 | .07 | .1 | .14 | .1c7 |
| 1/10 | .03 | .06314 | .1 | .12497 | .19 |
| 1/11 | .03134… | .05642… | .09 | .1 | .1745d |
| 1/12 | .03 | .052 | .083 | .1 | .15 |
(I've only included five of the eleven possible bases under consideration between 6 and 16. All the odd bases are eliminated right off the bat; you can't even tell if a number is even on quick sight, and so they have a ton of repeating decimals and other bad rows. 14's a little better, but it's uniformly worse than any of the five I highlighted above, so it's not worth even considering; being divisible by 2 and 7 makes for bad arithmetic.)
I've color-coded the entries above according to how difficult they are, so you can see at a glance how each base does.
Right off the bat, 8 looks like a bad base. An orange for 3 is pretty much enough to rule it out immediately - hard math for such a low number is really annoying - and the rest of the numbers don't even come close to making up for that. Powers of 2 just aren't great, since not many numbers divide them evenly. Scratch it off the list.
We also see immediately that base 10 isn't very good - it's got several oranges and a red fairly early, at relatively low numbers (and we use lower numbers more often, so that's bad!).
Base 16 does better than I would have expected, with plenty of early greens and yellows. (Base 16's only prime factor is 2, but the factors of the largest digit are also important, and luckily 15 is 3×5 so it covers for 16's flaws.)
However, the table leaves off the values 13-15, and it's important to evaluate all the single-digit rows for a base; if we included them, they'd all be orange or red. Overall it looks very slightly better than base 10 for low values, but slightly worse for high values; we'll call it even with base 10 for the nice benefit base 16 would bring in the computer age.
Base 12 comes out looking pretty nice at first - the first several are all green - but then it hits a hard pair of reds at 5 and 7, which is pretty unfortunate. 5 is a pretty small and commonly-used number, so making arithmetic with it difficult is a pretty bad thing. Besides those two reds, tho (and the one additional red at 10), the rest of the numbers are pretty great, all yellows or greens (and the 1/8 and 1/9 yellows are both "easy" yellows, exactly half or a third between .1 and .2). Despite the unfortunate red at 5, it's pretty clear why 12 is often considered better than 10.
Base 6, tho, obviously comes out on top here. Not a single red until 11, which no other base can boast, and even its oranges wait until 7 to show up. And some of its yellows/oranges are right on the edge of lower categories - .13 and .043 are similar to .15 in decimal, exactly halfway between shorter values (.1 and .2, or .04 and .05), which makes them easier to work with than the naive analysis would suggest.
Based on this analysis, base 6 definitely has the easiest arithmetic.
Primality
Intuitions around primes just seem to be easier to develop in base-6, too.
In decimal, primes all end in 1, 3, 7, or 9. That's enough digits that people often don't even consciously realize this fact. Heximal primes all end in 1 or 5; approximately the same % of the digits, but a small enough absolute number that it should be intuitively obvious right away.
Perhaps more importantly, that last-digit-of-primes thing is due to 10 being easily divisible by 2 and 5; but it's not easily divisible by any other primes, most notably 3 or 7. You have to do the add-the-digits trick to test for 3-divisibility, and there's no trick for 7, you just have to do full division and see if there's a remainder. This means that it's simply not obvious whether or not a lot of numbers are prime, even small ones; you can trick a lot of people by asking them to quickly tell you if 57 is prime or not (most people will call it prime at first glance, but it's 3*19).
Heximal, tho, has the trivial last-digit test for 2 and 3, the "add all the digits" test for 5, and a moderately easy "alternate adding and subtracting the digits" for 7 (notably, meaning that 116, 226, 336, 446, and 556 are all divisible by 7, like how 11 works in decimal).
This difference seems small, but still significant.
Length of Numbers, and Digit "Breakpoints"
As mentioned earlier, binary is a bad base for humans, because it produces very long representations. Humans have a "difficulty floor" for dealing with individual digits, so having a long number full of very-simple digits doesn't actually trade off properly; you still end up paying a larger "complexity price" per digit, times a long representation, for a very complex result.
In base-10, numbers up to a hundred use 2 digits, and numbers up to a thousand use 3 digits. Base-6 is fairly close to this: 2 digits gets you to 36, 3 to 216, and 4 to 1296. Since we don't generally work with numbers larger than 1000 in base-10 (after that we switch to grouping into thousands/millions/etc, so we're still working with 3 or less digits), you get the same range from base-6 by using, at most, 4 digits. That's only gaining one digit; combine that with the vastly simpler mental math, and you're at worst hitting an equal complexity budget to base-10.
Tho it's less accurate than base-10, we can still use 4 heximal digits (129610) as a group approximately equal to 10 binary digits: the kilo- prefix would be 1,00006, just like it's 100010; mega- would be 1,0000,0006, etc.
Orders of Magnitude
In general, too, an order of magnitude in heximal is more useful than in base 10; it's a smaller, more usable number, and two orders of magnitude is great, too.
For example, decimal time has never caught on because if you divide the day into groups of 100, the hour/minute/seconds are too small (new-hour is ~15 old-minutes, new-minute is about 10 old-seconds, new-second is about .1 old-seconds). But if you divide them into 10 it's too course; going down three levels to the new-second would still leave you about 1 1/2 old minutes! You need to either do a mixed-base system of 10 hours, 100 minutes, 100 seconds (awkward, and not much better than our 24/60/60), or switch to five time divisions between "day" and "second".
On the other hand, heximal time works great with two digits per division. 1006 hours per day means each is 40 old-minutes long, which is still useful for the same purpose that old-hours are; 1006 minutes per hour means each minute is ~66 old-seconds, almost exactly on target; 1006 seconds per minute, then, puts the second at about two old-seconds, which again is about as useful as old-seconds are.
(This coincidentally means we retain the current time intuitions, like ":30" is half-past, a third of an hour is 20 minutes, etc., even tho the number denoted by "30" or "20" is different in old time and heximal time! This ties together counting numbers and time numbers, too, making everything easier for children to learn, as it all works together in coherent systems.)
We can similarly use heximal metric units, which would have made the transition from imperial units much easier. After all, imperial has 12 inches to the foot, and 3 feet to the yard, so 36 inches to the yard in total. That's our old pal 1006! And a yard is very close to a meter, so a "metric inch" would be just slightly larger than an imperial inch. Keeping to the new "kilo- means 4 heximal digits" practice, a heximal kilometer is about .8 imperial miles, much closer than the .6 miles of a decimal kilometer, again easing adoption.
And heck, the metric system is kinda inconvenient anyway! 1000x steps are large; it means there's a huge difference between each "base" unit as you move up and down the prefixes. (Millimeter is too small for most everyday measurements, but meter is too large. Etc.) And because each prefix is 3 digits, there's no useful "halfway" breakpoint to use either; we just kinda arbitrarily use the centimeter for everyday measurements because we have to, but it's awkward when doing unit conversions.
But heximal metric does have a useful halfway breakpoint: 2 digits! Thirty-ish of something is a great number to have, as we established with time. So just like the heximal inch is the useful halfway point between the meter and the (heximal) millimeter, we would even have a useful breakpoint between the meter and the kilometer, 1006 meters, or the heximal chain (after the imperial chain), which is about 20 meters).
With both of these together, metric conversions involving time and other units finally become easy: 20 km/hour == 20 m/s (and 20 chains/minute!), no more of that awkward division by 60, 3600, or 86400.
In Conclusion
So, base 6 has more useful divisors, making it easy to divide by many small numbers. It's got a smaller (and thus easier to memorize/use) addition table, and a multiplication table that's not only substantially smaller than base-10, but substantially easier in very significant ways, making mental arithmetic much simpler. We can cover a similar range of numbers with just three digits, so it even looks similar to base-10 when the numbers get large enough to need scientific notation.
If you ever find a time machine, let me know so I can fix this. ^_^
CC0 license
That would give us 20 months a year, 50 days a month (roughly), 120 minutes per hour and 40 hours per day. Weeks are still odd with 11 days, but not any worse than decimal 7. I'm sold.
Reply?
Yeah, that's all assuming we change nothing else about the organization of our times.
Note that it's 140 minutes/hour, not 120.
Reply?
Good post. There is a lot worth considering in there and you laid it out in a way that is pretty easy to follow, which can be hard with this stuff. I have to argue against your conclusion for which is better between 12 and 6 in the complexity of arithmetic section. 12 has no oranges, mic drop. 12 only has reds in fractions at factors of 5 and 7, only 2 special lines to memorize in multiplication tables. thus counting 1/10 as a third red against 12 is representing the situation unfairly, as you are factoring by a multiple of 5. In a 12 system every factor and fraction outside multiples of 5 or 7 is a green or yellow. 1/11 in base 6 is a really ugly number, so much and so early that we should consider adding purple as a step past red. Or at least a very dark red, lol.
Now, your point that in multiplication tables of base 6 multiples of 7 act like multiples of 11 in decimal, is huge. I love that. I never realized that. No other system actually makes 7 suck less, only base 6. #die7die lol
Thanks for the fun post!
Reply?
Great, thought-provoking post. I share your reservations about base ten, but I lean towards replacing it with with base eight or base sixteen.
How is base six better than base eight? The latter allows halving or doubling an arbitrary number of times without getting irregular. I don't think base six offers that. Base six offers easy division by three, but not by five, or by seven, so the question seems to be, how important is division by three, or multiplication by three, compared to iterated halving or doubling?
Reply?
Those are reasonably useful fractions! Well, 5 is, at least. The fact that we currently use base 10 probably means we use 5 a bit more than we otherwise would, but it's still a nice small number that shows up reasonably often, and having it be awful is quite bad.
And reds, in general, are quite bad. The progression of difficulty between the categories isn't even: the orange->red jump is a lot worse for mental arithmetic than yellow->orange. The problem is not the slight difficulty bump, but crossing a total difficulty threshold that the orange category just barely straddles, but red is definitely over. In base 10, multiplying or dividing by 8 is hard but doable (worst case, you can just halve/double it three times), but using 7 either requires you to sit and manually think thru the steps, or pull out pencil and paper. So having the third and fourth prime be red is pretty unfortunate for a base, as that'll infect a decent fraction (about 30%!) of all future numbers.
Nah, that's completely fair. Using 10 in base 12 sucks, objectively; the fact that this is "because of 5" doesn't matter. (That explains why it's bad, but doesn't make it any better.) If we were using base 9, all the even numbers would be at least yellow; the fact that this is because they're all divisible by 2 doesn't change the fact that half of all numbers are at least slightly difficult to use, which is why odd bases suck.
I purposely didn't add any gradations past red, because it represents a meaningful difficulty threshold - after this point, everything's "too difficult for mental math" and requires paper or a calculator, so it doesn't really matter precisely how difficult it is.
Calling 11 "early" while downplaying 5 and 7's difficulty in base 12 is slightly amusing, tho - when's the last time you had to multiply or divide by 11, particularly a large enough number that the 11,22,33,... pattern didn't suffice? 11's mostly past the point of usefulness in mental math, and at least in base 6 it's 19₆, so for most purposes you can just do math with 20₆ and scooch the result a little to compensate. That's basically what you do in base 10 anyway - just multiply/divide by 10 and scooch the result a little.
And circling back to my "everything red is past the threshold" point - without looking back at the chart or doing the math yourself, can you rattle off the six-digit cycle for 1/7 in base 10? I doubt it! (And if you're one of the weirdos, like me, who does have it memorized (it's actually a really neat cycle!), you're part of an extreme minority who shouldn't be counted as influencing the "how difficult is this number" intuition. ^_^) So treating a 10-digit cycle as uniquely difficult isn't very reasonable, since a 6-digit cycle is already off-the-charts difficulty for the vast majority of people. In practice, they're both "maximum difficulty" with no real differentiation.
(As a tangent, note that 11's length (10 digits repeating) isn't anything special to base 6, it's just the normal "maximum possible length" that you get from a number that's fully coprime to the base and its two surrounding numbers - repeating with a period one less than itself. In bases where it's red, 7 repeats with a period of 6, 5 repeats with a period of 4, etc; long division doesn't allow for a longer cycle to exist. You get the same ridiculously long cycle in base 10 from 13 (12 digits repeating), for example.)
Actually, base 8 is even better for 7, making it a yellow, which is even better. (But it makes 5 a red T_T) But yeah, there's no other reasonably-low base which makes 7 reasonable. (13 and 15 have it as orange and yellow again, but they're odd bases and so are out of consideration from the get-go. The next even bases that care about 7 are 20 and 22.)
Reply?
Base-8 isn't terrible, but it's not great, either. Base-16 is surprisingly decent, I'll grant you (notably, because (16 - 1) is 15, it gives 3 and 5 pretty decent treatment); I put it roughly on par with base-10, and the easy interop with binary makes for a compelling argument in modern days. My only big strike against it is its size; I don't find it offers quite enough benefit to make up for a multiplication table 2.5x the size of base-10.
It is true that halving/doubling in base 8 or 16 is convenient forever, since it hits powers of the base. But how often do you double an arbitrary number of times? If we used these bases we'd double/halve more, sure, but mostly because we're moving up/down the orders of magnitude, which we do in any base; it would just be convenient that, say, hexadecimal "kilo" means doubling eight times or whatever. Other bases won't have quite as convenient a step between their orders of magnitude, but my experience with base-10 metric suggests that isn't a big problem in practice.
I do think that multiplying/dividing by 3 is very common, definitely more common than repeated doubling/halving. Base-12 people are right to call it out as a big benefit of their base!
(Imperial volume measures stretching from tablespoon to gallon are all related by powers of 2, so there's an argument that we find that doubling/halving property reasonably compelling for volumes, at least. But note that Imperial lengths went for more complex divisions invoking 3 as well, presumably because thirding/tripling a length is also reasonably common in practice.)
All that said, I think base-16 people have about as good an argument for their base as base-12 people, maybe even slightly better - both are a little better than base-10. But I'm still strongly of the opinion that base-6 is at least slightly better than all of them in a multitude of ways.
Reply?
It looks like perhaps the fractional expansions table has lost its proper coloring? The oranges all look yellow to me, and the text gray is completely illegible on the light backgrounds...
Reply?
That was on my desktop, which showed the page in a stylesheet with a black background. On my phone, there's a white background with black text, and the table looks great.
Reply?
I just wanted to mention you could convert base-6 (senary) into balanced notation, using symbols for -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3. Let's just say -3 is C, -2 is B, and -1 is A (I usually use a dot below for the negative version of a number, but I'm my lunch hour and my desk computer isn't available).
With a bit of a twist, using the concept of banker's rounding (round half to even), you can make the representation of each number unique -- 13 would not be a valid number, but 2C would be.
Counting 1-100 (1-36 base-10) would be:
1, 2, 3, 1B, 1A, 10, 11, 12, 2C 2B, 2A, 20, 21, 22, 23, 3B, 3A, 30, 1C1, 1C2, 1BC, 1BB, 1BA, 1B0 1B1, 1B2, 1B3, 1AB, 1AA, 1A0 1A1, 1A2, 10C, 10B, 10A, 100
The nice thing about this representation is that not only is each number unique, rounding any number is simply truncation. If you make the notation so it is clear the positive and negative versions of a number, multiplication and fractions are even more trivial than in the standard form of base-6. For example, the 1/11 fraction in decimal, which should be: 0.0313452421(repeating) should be 0.1C2BA A3B21 (the first 5 numbers are the negative versions of the second five numbers).
Oops back to work.
Reply?
Fixed, along with making sure that wide tables (like that one) don't cause the whole page to stretch.
Reply?
Balanced notations are interesting, but ultimately (imo) a curiosity. The ability to forgo a negative sign isn't worth the loss of a lot of intuitive arithmetic properties.
Reply?
You made a fundamental mistake. Your notation has 7 digits when it should have 6, ergo you can't have balanced notation. It only applies to odd numbered bases (base-3 being the smallest).
Reply?
Nah you can make "balanced" notations where any amount of the digits are positive or negative.
You lose a lot of elegance if you're not perfectly balanced, but it still technically works, at least.
Reply?
Your hours and minutes are well and good, but I find fault with your last statement: your seximal second (hereafter second₆) is significantly less useful than the decimal second (hereafter second₁₀), because it’s slow enough that it disrupts our perception of rhythm, making second₆-long ticking not feel like a rhythm, and making counting time in your head in second₆ units somewhere between difficult and impossible.
(End of summary, feel free to stop reading, or keep on for more details.)
Seconds₁₀ are a useful unit that we can keep track of as the fundamental unit of reckoning. Now it is common to subdivide seconds₁₀ into halves, thirds, quarters and even sixths for mental dead reckoning, but it’s also very common to use seconds₁₀ as the fundamental unit. (I learned it in sixths in childhood, with the rhythm “one, cat and dog, two, *&c.*”; but before adulthood I abandoned that in favour of reckoning seconds₁₀ directly.)
Adam Neely’s video *What is the slowest music humanly possible?* (with the delightful thumbnail containing the text “it’s about 33 bpm.”) goes into this subject at some length, waxing philosophical especially later on, but with some good facts and explanations; from about 1:33 until 4:37 is the main useful chunk.
Here’s a quote used in the video, from Paul Fraisse’s book The Psychology of Time:
Your second₆ is about 1,852ms. At that point, you *need*\* a shorter unit to count in, because our brains just don’t work for counting accurately that slowly.
In my experience (no citation), almost all adults can consciously reckon time to within about 10%, many get to within 1% without any practice, and practice increases precision. Many of these are using integral seconds₁₀ as their unit. I believe most would find it physically impossible to attain that level of accuracy counting in integral seconds₆.
You can only make seconds₆ really work by subdividing, but now that subdivision is essential; whereas in decimal such subdivision is optional, only used for this one purpose, and personal in nature. I suspect that as more people started using seximal time natively (that is, thinking in it) you’d find pressure to formalise a customary unit which was a subdivision of seconds₆ (½, ⅓ or ⅙).
I’ve focused on counting time, but I think other activities would be hindered by the overly-long second₆ as well, pretty much anything where you’re actively experiencing seconds₆. Ticking clocks already annoy me, but I’d be curious to see the effect of a clock ticking in integral seconds₆. I suspect it’d be more disconcerting, perhaps even for a seximal-time-native, due to the breakdown of subjective rhythmisation. Ticking on integral seconds₁₀ is already probably? worse than on half seconds₁₀, which might or might not be related.
\* I admit this subjective rhythmisation isn’t the only relevant thing; the perceptual present (2:45–3:30 in the video) is also relevant; counting in a unit longer than the perceptual present would definitely be impossible, but I imagine that counting in a unit less than that should be at least possible. It’s said to probably be somewhere in the range 3–8 seconds, so your seximal second should be tolerably clear of it. But as regards accuracy and consistency, I think subjective rhythmisation is still going to be essential.
Reply?
K I'm gonna sound like a 10 defender but I promise I'm not.
A decent part of your analysis seems to have been weighted on your fraction complexity charts but in my opinion you grade for them is hardly objective. I think anyone would agree when you look at 8 like this, it comes out bad. But did you notice that while 6 doesn't have a red until 11... 10 has exactly the same number of reds, yellows and oranges as 6 if you go up to and include 11? Why then is your initial statement that 10 looks pretty bad? I agree they're all arbitrary but that section in particular was not as convincing to me as I think you meant it to be. In fact it only made me surprised that 10 seemed so good* compared to everyone's favorites 12 and 16 (although 12 deserves a second look when it has no oranges... (Mic drop I guess?) ) It's certainly difficult to try to create an objective grade when I'm not even sure everyone would agree on the color coded system, but I actually think those selections were reasonable. Though I for one would at least like to see the totals of each color added (say 0 for green, 1 for yellow, etc. And again suddenly 10 is the same as 6 up to 11 unless we start to say some numbers are more important than others and then more weighting (and arguing) is obviously required. Maybe you could programmatically calculate the totals up to certain points as well since up until 12 I'm sure they're all pretty close.
So I just feel that chart can have different interpretations and if you remove the bias of which bases they represents and leave colors, I think you could 'trick' a lot of people into concluding 6 and 10 are basically tied for the best compared to the others. Also you admit 16 has many redeemable qualities but I thought the chart gives it quite a bad image no? Surely worse than 12. By saying it has plenty of early greens and yellows you must also coincide 10 does.
Also in another answer you say no other base makes 7 suck less than six, while I'm sure a great argument could be had on whether it's worth considering 7 more important than 11 and factoring that into the decision it's still just the same reason 11 does not suck in 10, nothing special other than it hitting its 'nice' number early, although I suppose I'll coincide you'd get a multiple of 7 more often than 11 for that reason.
Reply?
Gosh I love Adam Neely.
Curiously, that "slowest bpm" is approximately 1Hz in hex. While it's not a particularly useful rhythm to get such an auspicious number, it at least is still (barely) a beat we can track as humans.
And hey, if music ends up usually being marked in half or third seconds, that's not a huge problem anyway.
Reply?
Because reds are significantly worse to work with than oranges. Later on you can get things that just edge over the limit of red, but these reds are all in the "maximum bad" category, where they repeat with the longest possible decimal (number of digits one less than the value itself).
Now combine that with the fact that lower numbers are more useful for mental math, so having a bad number low down is worse than having one higher up - how often, in your real life, have you had to mentally divide something by eleven, where "divide by ten and just scootch it down a little" wasn't an adequate strategy instead? Myself, I'd say approximately 0 times. (In hex, it's "divide by twosy and scootch it up a little", but same diff.)
With lower numbers weighted higher than higher numbers, hex simply has the best possible division table for any reasonable base. (To get better you have to go with ridiculous bases, like 210, to get a lot of prime factors.)
"No oranges" is pretty meaningless when that's paired with "two reds for low, useful primes". Multiplying or dividing by five is relatively common in my mental math, and having it be supremely awkward, as it is in dozenal, would be pretty annoying.
The coloring is based on objective criteria: a divisor got one point for every digit in its unit fraction, and a bonus point if it was repeating. Then it was green if it had 1 point, yellow for 2, orange for 3, and red for 4+. This criteria maps directly to how difficult it actually is to do math with the value. One could argue with the precise scaling, but in my personal estimation this simple system captures relative difficulties well enough.
Right, my point was that I was surprised that 16 is as good as it is, considering how bad its factors are (just 2s!). 16 isn't a good base, I just thought it would be a worse base before I made the chart.
Tho, again, low numbers are more important than high numbers, so 16 performing well in the 2-6 range brings it closer to 10 than you'd think, considering the higher number of reds it has in the higher numbers. Those simply aren't as relevant.
Yes, exactly, 7 is more important than 11. (But significantly less important than 2-6.)
Reply?
Actually, it would be 14 months a year, 100 days a month, 10 days a week, 100 hours a day, 100 minutes a hour, 100 seconds a minute. (in the improved seximal time)
Reply?
Good points all around. A sixth of a heximal second (which I'll call a jif here) is however entirely within the range of usable units; the traditional Chinese "second", the miǎo, was about 144 ms, which is a pretty strong endorsement of the usability of units that short, and a jif would be ~308.66 ms. Kind of a shame there's no good way to keep the double digit scale all the way down, but you can at least keep a consistent base.
However, I wouldn't want to have to constantly convert jifs to seconds every six jifs, and I'm a lot less averse to 10:100:100 decimal time than the author seems to be. 100:100:1000 heximal time however seems perfectly serviceable to me.
Reply?