tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Nov 08 12:05:30 1994
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Re: the qelI'qam, was Re: Nonexistent words ...?
>Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 20:42:28 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "Kevin A. Geiselman, Knight Errant" <[email protected]>
>On Mon, 7 Nov 1994, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>>
>> Um... what has 9,000 to do with threes? Only to someone who assumes
>> there's significance to 10 (and therefore 1000) in the first place does the
>> 3x3 become apparent. In base 3, 9000=110100100. In base 9, it's 13310.
>> Not really round numbers, any more than 8560 is a round number in base 10.
>>
>Which is exactly my point. The base ten would be a 'natural' way of
>counting because Klingons have ten fingers. A mystical significance of
>3x3 to make 9 is a simple addition onto the base 10. It doesn't need to
>be more complicated than that. The meter is based on some nearly
>arbetrary division of the Earth's circumferene.
Good point! I was so focussed on your trying to find significance in
threes that I overlooked the obvious point that Klingons (near as we can
tell) have ten fingers and would therefore logically attribute some
significance to tens.
>Personally, I find the comment on the 'Conversational Klingon' tape that
>Klingons abandoned the base three system to better understand 'advanced
>technology' to be insulting. Surely, Klingons had been using base-10 for
>many things since they first evolved intelligence. It's easy to count to
>10 when you have 10 fingers. And while the base-3 was used for
>'official' communiques and documents, base-10 was used by the great
>unwashed masses. When Klingon civilization became able to hurl
>themselves above their clouded world the need to accurize their calendars
>in that way became obsolete. Base three died out (as, hopefully, the
>English system of measure will)
I also didn't like that line. After all, if you want a base that's
conducive to higher technology, base 2 (or more likely a power of 2, like
octal or hexadecimal) makes a whole lot more sense (a binary computer is
very likely to be the first electronic computer developed by a given
society). But Terran cultures stubbornly cling to base 10, even though
it's so ill-suited to computing technology. Okrand was probably trying to
be cute about the threes, but didn't want to blow away his readership *too*
much (or be made to explain why a ten-fingered race would count in base 9).
Not so sure about the English system. After all, it people didn't come up
with it just on a whim, because it was a pain to use. They *could* have
developed a simple decimal system too; they already counted in tens. But
ten is just an inconvenient base: it doesn't divide up into most things
well. Even something as simple as dividing up a dollar three ways doesn't
work. But 12 is a nice base for business; you can easily split a shilling
into three sets of four pence, no sweat. It's just that with modern
machinery, doing that division is easier so we're more inclined to move to
something that's easier on counting and multiplying.
~mark