Survey posted 2008-10-08 17:13 by Astrid.

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Survey idea thanks to benryves.

Wait ok i guess BCD doesn't count as a base... but why did i see so many exam questions about converting to and from BCD :P

It's called HEX :)

I'm dissapointed by the lack of NaOH. Voted "first" instead.

I have seen trinary used more often than ternary for the name of the base (even though ternary seems to be proper for other uses).

This is a calculator web site. How could they have missed base e?

What about the data- variety?

it is ternary.

I am however disappointed by the lack of tertiary.

Wikipedia does concur that is the standard name for base 3 (see link). The OED (as of 1989) says "trinary" is rare & does not associate it with base 3 (even though Wikipedia does), so perhaps it is a more recent phenomenon.

NaOH is a worthy canidate, though i think i prefer Ca(OH)2.

Binary solo:
0000001
00000011
0000001
00000011!

Oh Oh 1!
Oh Oh 1!

Come on sucker, lick my battery!

My favorite :)

Gosh, I love Flight of the Conchords.

Voted decimal because I use it most often.

This is a tough one. I like them all! Binary is cool but gets pretty unwieldy. Hexadecimal helps with that a lot. Ternary is fun. Decimal is familiar. I don't really care for octal as much for some reason. I guess it just doesn't seem interesting enough to me.

Bases like 60 and 360 are interesting because so many numbers are divisible into them. I don't really like our “decimal-coded-sexigesimal” system for expressing time of day, though. Decimal would have suited my fancy a bit more. Oh well.

Forgot to mention that I ended up voting for hexadecimal since 256 (1 byte; 8 bits; 2 hex digits) is my favorite number.

Surely you need nine bits to represent 256? ;-)

Well, it allows you to represent 256 different values (since zero counts as a value). That's kind of what I meant. :-)

Perhaps you would fancy the French Republican Calendar?

Check the link for details.

I've read that article before, but instead of hours, minutes, and seconds, I had always imagined a simpler time of day simply consisting of four or so digits from 0000 to 9999 (each unit would be 8.64 seconds long). The number of significant digits used could easily be shifted to increase or decrease precision as needed.

I never gave much thought to the calendar system, though, since it's a lot trickier to force into a decimal system. I think I would prefer a system that numbers days, months, and years starting with zero instead of one, though, so a date like 03.01 would mean that the year was three months and one day old instead of just two months and zero days old. It just seems “nicer” for some reason, and it would be consistent with the time system starting at zero each day.

It would take some getting used to, but it would at least make software dealing with dates and times a lot less of a pain in the neck to write. I guess while I'm dreaming I could say that the next step would be to manufacture a new planet that would have a year length perfectly divisible into an even decimal number of days. ;-)

...or we could make seconds, hours, days, months, & years all be powers of 2 in the fundamental unit of time if we really wanted programming convenience. :)

*tries to change constants of nature*

Oh yeah, forgot about that. But I like decimal better. :-)

I use dec the most, but hex is more fun. I don't like oct as much because it is boring, not as many times tables to remember. And people think it is strange when you are counting things us in hex :P

Ternary is the best!