This post made me decide to go to sleep because I'm too fucking tired for this shit
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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A base-neutral system for naming numbering systems (by jan Miseli) is my favorite solution for this problem.
There are only 10 types of people:
the ones that expected a binary joke, and
the ones that expected a ternary joke, and
the ones that expected a quartenary joke, and
...
We have N fingers, naturally.
...and all of them are using base 10.
And it works just as well, if we reverse the roles:
🪨🪨🪨🪨🪨
🪨🪨🪨🪨🪨
🪨
Human: There are 11 rocks.
Alien: Oh, you must be using base A. See, I use base 10.
Human: No, I use base 10. What is base A?
Roman : There are XI rocks.
(hexadecimal)
Alien has 4 fingers...nice touch
You mean 10 fingers
Oh, you must be using base 4. You see, Phoenix alpha uses base 10.
Base 4 but indexes start at 1
1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30…
all your base are belong to us
Oh, sorry we're base 22
Based.
So should I be saying base 9+1?
for that one alien, you may say :
"base 3 + 3 + 3 + 1"
For universal other sentient beings, say :
"base 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
+ 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1"
"I'm 16, but in base 1, I'm 10000000000000000 years old. My ID just needs to be updated."
Since in base 2 you have two numerals that are (0, 1) ...
Then, in base 1 you would have only one numeral.
if it was (1) then you could write :
( , 1, 11, 111, ...)
With a sign (-) for negative numbers :
( ..., -111, -11, -1, , 1, 11, 111, ... )
I think the best way I've seen was to just poke the number of holes in the dirt or draw a picture, labeling them until you get to your base switching moment.
Oh fuck oh shit I'm too high to handle this RN!
Is this from the Hail Mary trailer?
Amaze! jazz hands
Correct
Only works in written form. Unless the alien says the number as one-zero.
Also, in a bijective number system, every base is 11. (they don't have 0)
edit: not true, brainfart
There is nothing about 10 in its pronounced form that means it HAS to come after 9.
No. If you write 11 in base b, bijective number system or not, that's b+1, not b.