this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
7 points (70.6% liked)
Standardization
453 readers
1 users here now
Professionals have standards! Community for all proponents, defenders and junkies of the Metric (International) system, the ISO standards (including ISO 8601) and other ways of standardization or regulation!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I like hexadecimal because since it's (2^2)^2 so it works with computers pretty well. 2^2 is too few symbols, it would make writing numbers unnecessarily long. And ((2^2)^2)^2 is too many symbols to easily memorize.
Binary is really good for signal processing, because you need to worry about two distinct states. Could be two voltages, two currents, two frequencies, two anything. If you use base n in your system, you would need to make sure those n states are pretty much guaranteed to be separate at all times, and that’s surprisingly difficult. Binary is very wasteful, but it is also very robust.
If your numbers need to exist on paper, then binary isn’t a very appealing option. If you’re limited by the space on your golden paper, then base million or something like that would be ideal. If you’re limited by human brain capacity to learn digits, then binary would be great, base 10 is ok, base 20 might be kinda pushing it and base million is out of the question.