Base 11 and What Might Have Been for the Cake Industry

There are a lot parts of normal life that we treat as having some natural basis that actually originated because some guy said so. One that trips me up is that our tradition counting in base 10 has no mathematically oriented basis, and it is most likely the result of our having 10 fingers.

If we had 11 fingers, what we call 121 would be a as round a number as our 100. The 121 meter dash would basis for world records, and those runners would be a bit more out of breath.

Speaking of distance, that baffles me too. On inspection, units of distance — and time for that matter — are all completely made up too. Metric, standard, hell even Kelvin. A mile is five thousand two hundred and eight feet. That’s not even pretending to be based in some natural fact. If by chance we measured years on how often Mercury circles the Sun, instead of Earth, I’d be 119 and the birthday cake business would be absolutely booming.

And so, I just have trouble getting excited about birthdays, the year 2000 and top 10 lists. All we’re doing is commemorating a multiple of an arbitrary unit of measurement that is “round” in an the number system whose base is itself based on skeletal protrusions at the end of our arms. This was decided to be so, mind you, not out of informed reason, but on what some guy who has been dead for millennia — millennia! — pulled out of his ass, or in a more likely scenario, on what he counted on his phalanges.

[p.s. this is my first blog post and this is a new blog about numbers, startups, existentialism, and more]