The Dozenal Society of America

An uncle who designed jet engines at General Electric said one advantage GE had over European counterparts was the greater diversity in sheet metal gauges/thicknesses used to build the engines; they could maintain required strength throughout an engine while paring down engine weight. He attributed the better mix to the English system encouraging divisibility by 2/3/4/6 rather than 2/2.5/5/10 at various scales.

The most interesting argument I've heard from the dozenal society is that the decimal system is inherently selfish. There is a reason that cases of beer come in packs of 6, 12, 18, 24, 30 instead of 5, 10, 15, etc. It is much more likely you will be able to divide them equally amongst a group of arbitrary size.

Only marginally related, but I spent one of my summers at PROMYS[1] doing research into which complex numbers could be successfully used as bases. As different as the various common integer bases &quot;feel&quot; in terms of hand-computation, there&#x27;s nothing like cranking out conversions of fractions to base 1+i to make you realize that there&#x27;s a whole wacky universe of number representations out there. I thought it was a really cool field of study, and I remember wishing there were more readily apparent applications. Anyone?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.promys.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.promys.org&#x2F;</a>

I stumbled onto these guys a few years back when I was going nuts about base 18 (which you can do on a standard 5x2 abacus!). I think they have their own symbols for digits &gt; 9 instead of using &#x27;a&#x27; and &#x27;b&#x27; in the hexadecimal fashion.<p>Non-standard radixes are pretty fun, and it makes you think about nebulous questions like &quot;what does ten mean&quot;, and if you happen to carry that train of thought way past the station, &quot;what does it mean to be a number?&quot;

For a fictional treatment of converting a society to base 12, Leo Frankowski&#x27;s <i>High Tech Knight</i> series is a lighthearted and fun read (starts with <i>The Crosstime Engineer</i>).<p>[I didn&#x27;t like the books past the original 4, YMMV]

I wonder how they feel about base e?

I can&#x27;t tell if this was meant as a joke or not