numbers

There is a part in Alice in Wonderland where her math is all gibberish - she says 9 + 9 = 10 or something like that; the crazy thing I just learned is that she was right - she's just using a base 18 decimal system.

Why do we use base 10? Some cultures have used base 12, the number of knuckles on the human hand, base 20, even base 60... in our decimal system, we have 10 named numbers and all others are a combination of those. 1-9, then 10 is really just (1 x 10) + 0. "10" isnt a number, it's a code.

In Alice's case the concept of 18 (9 + 9) is represented by "10", because in a base 18 system 10 is code for (1 x 18) + 0.

crazy.

I'm reading this book The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number which is a tangential romp through the history of numbers and I love it.

the importance of Santa

Why do childhood myths like Santa have such sticking power? People talk about the duplicity of it, speculating that we are misleading our children, etc... But I've come to believe that these childhood myths, the ones that are clearly false to older people, play a crucial role in developing critical thinking ability. The process of discovery is the first exercise of a crucial skill: the ability to see through the popularly accepted truth. It's interesting that Christians caught up in the perverse and corrupt middle-ages' Catholic hierarchies and politics probably originated many of them.

just a thought for this morning.