_Why the lucky stiff is an exceptionally strange and interesting dude, who I had never seen on video before today. He had a cool blog about all kinds of interesting hacks in Ruby, and then he shifted gears to create Hackety Hack: a ruby programming environment built for fun. It has built-in lessons, and built-in graphics and audio libraries that make it quick to build interesting mini-applications. Anyway, this is a presentation about that, and a variety of cool, random other stuff.
Well, it only took 29 years to figure it out, but I finally know why it is we have such odd numbering schemes for time and space. You know, 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 12 inches, a dozen eggs… It will all make sense if you just count by twelves instead, like the Sumerians did. Check out this post on Scienceray for a nice little summary, but in short, to count in twelves like a Sumerian you iterate across the fingers of your left hand with your thumb while counting the number of twelves with your right fingers. This makes for a maximum of 60, most easily divisible by twelve. Check it:
Now, if you add an additional index below each finger on the left hand, then you can count in hex too. Actually, I’m in favor of completely changing all measurements to be decimal oriented. 1000 seconds is about 15 minutes (16.6), so people could think of various events and meetings in terms of kilo-seconds.
