373
3,700-year-old Babylonian stone tablet gets translated, changes history
(www.upworthy.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
373 points (93.1% liked)
News
22488 readers
5146 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
We've evolved with 14 knuckles on each hand... and a brain that struggles to keep 7 elements at once in operating memory. You can also count up to 1023 with just 10 fingers (in binary). It's not a lack of fingers problem.
I'm not sure what problem you're referring to. I mean if we naturally leant towards base 12, I wonder what would be different, if anything?
The problem is our brains have a limited operating memory. People can (unless disabled) easily track 1 o 2 items at once, even 3, 4, 5... and start losing track somewhere around 6 or 7; 8 is considered exceptional.
That's why kids don't generally use their fingers to count 2+2, but start using them for "harder" operations like 4+4.
Base 10 is already past our brain's limits... but we're kind of fine with it because we can use our fingers (think of it as evolving at a time before formal education when most people were illiterate).
Base 60 is also past our brain's limits, but it's easily divisible into easy to track 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 pieces (aka $lcm(1..6)$), which makes it highly useful. The Babylonians still used to write it down as base 6×10, and it was common to count on knuckles and fingers as 12×5.
The uneducated populace picked up the easiest part of the two: 5+5.
If we had 12 fingers, we could've as easily ended up using base 12, only thing different would be 1/3 would equal exactly 0.4, while 1/5 would equal 0.24972497... oh well, we'd manage.
If our brains could track 12 items at once however, then we could benefit from base $lcm(1..12)$ or 27720. That... is hard to imagine, because we can't track 11 items at once; otherwise 27720 would jump out as "obviously" divisible by 11, 9, or 7.