Re: FAA To Finally Ditch Floppy Disks & Win-95

On Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:40:53 -0400
c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:

Anyway, 60 different numbers ... likely twice as many symbols as
needed to write the main lang. Wow.

 
And then there's base-64...

 
Don't see that often ...
 
The Babylonian thing was PROBABLY an offshoot of religious philosophy.

Wikipedia has a quick rundown:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal#Babylonian_mathematics

Not 60 distinct digits (ye gods, just imagine that,) but kind of a
tally-mark system to form composite signs for the values 0-59, and
place-value usage of these. (Still probably takes some getting used
to...!)

There were probably religious factors (the Babylonian pantheon, IIRC,
has 60 gods or somesuch,) but it's a good question whether that's a
cause or symptom of the numeral system. Another factor might well be
that 60 is a number with a nice complement of small factors:

2 * 2 * 3 * 5

which makes it evenly divisible by:

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30

Anyone who's ever been annoyed by the tendency of decimal fractions to
end in infinite repetitions of digits/sequences should appreciate the
convenience.