In the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, and the Orbis Tertius," Borges writes about a short discussion of base 12, which he calls (at least in translation) duodecimal. This is interwoven with a discussion of the 1001 nights, which I found odd, so I wondered what 1001 base 12 was.<p>It turns out to be a rather unremarkable number: 1729.<p>Given the time that the story was published, it is possible that Borges, who was fascinated by mathematics and always encoding maths concepts into his stories, had read the anecdote about the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and hid it purposefully in the story.<p>Edit: anyone interested in reading more about how Borges incorporated mathematics into his stories might find this book worthwhile<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Library-Babel/dp/0195334574" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...</a>
April fools day was a while ago.<p>"What is ultimately and urgently needed, then, is a dozenalization of the SI base units of the metric system."<p>Right. And that after calling 'decimal time' a limit case of absurdity by decimalist agitators ? (iirc it was just a marketing stunt by swatch).<p>What's this then, a limit case of absurdity by duodecimalist agitators ?<p>It's funny, but nobody in their right mind is going to switch to base 12 any time soon.<p>Hard to tell if these guys are serious: <a href="http://www.dozenal.org/index.php?u=31" rel="nofollow">http://www.dozenal.org/index.php?u=31</a><p>I hereby propose we switch to base 11, prime numbers are so much more interesting than all these composites.