Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.

Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
    0·
    3 months ago

    Cultures that used base 12 counted on their knuckles with their thumb. 12 for each hand. Many common folk did that since you could count much higher if you counted by the dozen using both hands. Go from counting to 10 to finger counting to 12 dozen or a gross(144 in base10). Since we still have the English words for base12, you can see how close we were to adopting it.

      • Bertuccio@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        I mean… Western cultures? That’s why so many Western measuring systems are in base 12 and why we have special words for dozen and gross.

        Base 10 being ubiquitous is fairly new and it replaced bases like 12 and 16 that were easier for people to track mentally.

        EDIT: And that’s not to say non-Western cultures didn’t use 12 or 16. They’re super common all over.