I hadn't thought about dozens, but then except for Easter, I don't buy eggs very often, but bakery goods, particularly things like donuts and bagels (things of a certain shape?) you buy them by the dozen. The idea of the baker's dozen arises briefly here, but when was the last time you ordered a dozen torus-shaped goodies that you actually got thirteen. But why a dozen, why does a dozen even have a name? If you buy ten tori you say you bought ten, fourteen, fourteen, but if you buy twelve you call it a dozen.
Could this measure have arisen before we had started doing arithmetic, for the reasons of easy factoring for which it is sometimes proposed, if only by Uncle Ken. I don't suppose they had doughnuts back then, but whatever they had if you brought them home to your family, and your family, was two, three, four, or six, they could easily be split up without any fighting. Do the roots of the dozen go way back that far? Internet research will surely reveal, but not at the moment.
Units of measurement are something quite different. They arose form a variety of sources, but surely when the wheels of commerce started turning, they had to tighten things up. My guess is that they had some kind of standards like a pole of a certain length or a brick of a certain weight to measure things against. I am sure that there was a lot of chicanery going on, but isn't there always?
No big fan of the French, but they certainly cleared all that up with their revolution. Everything was logical, everything was in tens, what a splendid idea, why had nobody thought of that before? Everybody in the world thought it was a great idea, except us Americans, because we hadn't thought of it, and because we are fucking Americans.
We did to something with our currency, eliminating the pounds and the schillings and the pence, with one hundred cents to a dollar. And the dollar, I think we got that from the Spanish, and I think that's a long story.
I think the French even tried to go to a system of three ten day weeks per month, but that was too strange for people. You know time, we could easily go to breaking a day into ten or a hundred units, and break them into further divisions of ten, but nobody even talks about that.
Well now that I think of it time is broken down into base 12 units, 12 months, 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds. Is there a connection there with the dozen eggs and donuts? I'll bet there is. And you have to wonder why they didn't do the six day week. Five of them pack nicely into a month. I'm guessing that has something to do with the creation story. Does the bible specifically mention a seven day week? I think so, but we have a bible expert on board. So one would guess the ancient Hebrews had a seven day week or else they wouldn't have written the bible that way, but it still makes you wonder why seven.
I'm unaware of base 3 in computer science, and Old Dog neglects to mention the coolest base in computer science which is the base 16 with it's A's through F's. Back in my early days in computer school we learned about something called a data dump, which was something you could do if you couldn't figure out why your program wasn't running. I think it gave you the contents of the computing unit, like three pages in that green tinted paper that was popular than of nicely space rows and columns of 0-9's and A's-F's. There, now do you see why your program wasn't running?
Problem solving would be good for the young elementary student of today. I don't why they don't teach them elementary logic (IF/THEN), and maybe a bit of its attendant philosophy, though I expect the republicans would hate it, and now our new prez has made all that logic theory passe.
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