I saw people making a joke about this in a comment section and I couldn’t seem to understand what they were talking about. Can someone fill me in?
In: Mathematics
Base 8 is, essentially, what cartoon characters, who have three fingers and a thumb on each hand, would use.
Our system is base ten – both hands’ worth gets “chunked” into the next unit over. Ten ones is a ten, ten tens is a hundred, etc.
Theirs would use digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6, and 7; two hands’ worth would be eight, and they’d write that as “one eight plus none” the way we write “one ten plus none”. It would look the same: “10”.
If they wrote “324”, it would mean 3 sixty-fours, 2 eights, and 4; in base ten those add up to 212.
There is a relevant Tom Lehrer song, [New Math](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4).
–Dave, which actually covers it pretty well
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