Ted Ashton writes:

>  I'm in the middle of a book called _Number_ about the history of
numbers[1],
>  and the author claims that we use 60 minutes in an hour because the
>  Babylonians (I think it was) used a base 60 system.  Despite having to
>  learn 60 different numerals, this would be nice for the same reason that
>  the base 12 system would, but even more so.

This is all true, although the base 60 system that came to be used by the
Babylonians was apparently common in Mesopotamia for quite some time prior to
rise of Babylonia. The Egyptians, in contrast, used a base 10 system, which
was inherited by the Arabs and the Moors, which we have since inherited.

Although I'm repeating all of this material from memory, I reasonably believe
what I say here to be correct. In many parts of the world still today, the
word for "hand" is equivalent to the word for "five" -- and the word for
"ten" is two hands.

In the Mesopotamian system, fives and twelves were magic numbers -- simply
because on the fingers of one hand were the numbers 12, 24, 36, 48, 60. And
almost every place that the number 60 shows up in our modern usage, it is due
to a 5000 year heritage from Mesopotamia (leading to that oldest of
mathematical adages: to Ur is human).

You wear this counting system on your wrist (and that has always tickled me
to carry a bit of 5000 year-old technology around). The day was divided into
12 equal hours. The night was given equal due and was similarly divided into
12 hours also. The celestial equator (the zodiac) was similarly divided into
12 equal arcs, each of which was signified by a constellation of stars drawn
into an image. The hour was divided into 60 minutes and the minute was
divided into 60 seconds. It wasn't until time could be better parsed, 4500
years later, that the second was divided into hundreths (but by then, the
modulus used by the dominant civilizations had changed).

The year was divided into 360 (6 x 60) days -- and a circle was divided into
360 equal arcs (and 5000 years later, because the opposite side of the circle
remained 180 degrees away, Fahrenheit defined the distance in temperature
between water's freezing and boiling as 180 degrees; Celsius used the more
"modern" Egyptian system and made it 100 degrees).

And Steve Weisbrod writes:

>I always thought we had a base ten system because the earliest "calculator"
>had ten fingers and ten toes. On the other hand <g> I read somewhere that
>one of the physical traits of too much inbreeding is off-spring with six
>fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot...
>Does it follow then that civilizations that developed a base 12 system had
>a bloodline problem???

While Steve is clearly kidding, the physical trait Steve speaks of is called
polydactyly ("many fingers"). It is a common genetic/birth defect in all
mammals, not only humans. While it may be congenital, it need not be. It can
be environmentally induced. The defect is a failure of an upper-level
regulatory developmental process during embryogenesis. The code to build
fingers (and livers and hearts and eyes) exists in every cell of your body.
How many fingers are to be built during your development is simply a matter
of calling out a hierarchically organized object-oriented bit of code a
certain number of times.

When multiple additional fingers and toes are created, they are generally
small, not particularly functional, and taper off as they round the foot or
the hand. Nowadays, of course, they're surgically removed soon after birth.
But, if individuals in the distant past that had seven fingers prospered
better that those with other numbers, we'd all have seven fingers now as the
common norm. In an object-oriented coding structure, it doesn't take much to
modify the realized design (indeed, that is one of the most commonly touted
advantages of object-oriented programming: code re-use).

Wirt Atmar